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 teachers and English teachers collaborate with each other to diagnose students’ needs and develop a school-based content and language integrated curriculum to promote CLIL. For the second approach, in-service training workshops or courses are provided for content subject teachers in CLIL to raise their language awareness and equip them with strategies to integrate language scaffolding into their content subject lessons. With empirical data from several research projects, the speaker will discuss the strengths and limitations of these approaches and propose an integrated model for CLIL teachers’ professional development.

Dr Yuen Yi Lo is an Associate Professor at the Teacher Education and Learning Leadership (TELL) Unit of the Faculty of Education, the University of Hong Kong. She received her doctorate at the University of Oxford and had worked at the Hong Kong Education University prior to joining the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include bilingual education, Medium of Instruction policy and classroom interaction. In recent years, she has been investigating the professional development of teachers in content and language integrated learning (CLIL) programmes and issues related to CLIL assessment. Her research has been published Review of Educational Research, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, Language Teaching Research and Language and Education, and she has recently published her book “Professional Development of CLIL Teachers”.