Facilitating student learning in CLIL: Starting from professional development

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) can be used as an umbrella term to refer to a variety of bilingual education programmes (e.g. immersion, content-based instruction, EMI). These programmes share a common underlying principle – to integrate content and language learning, though to varying degrees. However, how teachers can integrate the two dimensions in their actual practices remains unresolved. One particular issue is how teachers, especially those content subject specialists, can help English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners to develop their academic literacy and content knowledge at the same time.

In this seminar, the speaker will share her experience of working with teachers in Hong Kong secondary schools, which are adopting English as the medium of instruction for some or all content subjects. She will focus on two approaches – promoting cross-curricular collaboration between English and content subject teachers and incorporating genre-based approaches in content subject lessons. For the first approach, content subject…