Across the globe, linguistically heterogeneous populations increasingly define school systems at the same time that developing the ability to communicate cross-culturally is becoming essential for internationalized economies. While these trends seem complimentary, they often appear in paradoxical opposition as represented in the content and execution of nationwide education policies. Given the differing geopolitical contexts within which school systems function, wide variation exists with regard to how policymakers address the challenges of providing language education, including how they frame goals and design programs to align with those goals. Here we present a cross-continental examination of this variation, which reveals parallel tensions among aims for integrating immigrant populations, closing historic achievement gaps, fostering intercultural understanding, and developing multilingual competencies. To consider implications of such paradoxes and parallels in policy foundations, we compare language education in the US and in the EU, focusing on the Netherlands as an illustrative case study.
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Liz is a CLIL and language teacher educator, senior lecturer, author, and researcher. Her publications include CLIL Skills, CLIL Activities, a doctoral thesis on the role of English teachers in bilingual streams and articles on multilingualism. She also chairs audit panels for bilingual streams in vocational and academic tracks. You will be introduced to a visual methodology as a way of uncovering learners’ multilingual experiences. Language mapping is a technique that helps learners uncover their own lived multilingual experiences and to represent and talk about these using their own words and descriptions. Liz Dale will show you how and why language mapping works and how you can integrate this exercise in a lesson. Of course, you will try your hand at creating your own language map!
This reports is about content and language integrated learning (CLIL) in multilingual primary classrooms. While in theory CLIL offers many opportunities for inclusive education in multilingual settings, questions remain as to how integrated language teaching can be realised, and what teacher knowledge is required for this. This research used a CLIL Teaching Wall activity and interviews with UK and Dutch primary school teachers to capture teacher knowledge underlying decision-making in actual multilingual classrooms. The report presents a framework of CLIL teacher knowledge that emerged from this work.
