[ELTWeekly Volume 8, Issue 8 | April 4, 2016 | ISSN 0975-3036]
It remains an interesting irony that subject teachers have been exhorted, ever since the famous Bullock Report in 1975, to become ersatz-language teachers in the ‘Language across the curriculum’ movement, whilst language teachers have never been exhorted to understand the world of content. They remain in the dark when it comes to subject teaching, and rarely observe teachers in ‘normal’ classrooms. The closest they often get to that world is by practising ‘Soft CLIL’ (allegedly ‘language-led) but this is something of a misnomer. Why would we want to make something ‘language-led’? Why not make it ‘concept-led’? Just use the language to help. If subject teachers are being asked to understand language, why cannot language teachers be asked to understand (and use) content? After all, there is a huge smorgasbord of the stuff out there, just waiting to be used.
Nevertheless, if language teachers want to understand and contribute to CLIL, for example in a bilingual school context or in any school dabbling with the approach, then it’s useful to understand the three-dimensional aspect of ‘content’. The world of CLIL is basicallyconceptual, procedural and linguistic. Language is also content, when viewed from this perspective. At any point in a lesson, the teacher may find that one of these dimensions is more prominent than the other. If the conceptual dimension (demand) is high then the linguisticdemand is probably similar