Essay
HOW DO YOU BALANCE THE ROLES BETWEEN LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION AND
SUBJECT TEACHING
I started teaching my first CLIL course a year ago. Being a lecturer for over four years and having an
additional three years of EFL teacher experience, I was glad to participate in the experiment and teach
a CLIL course, “English/History of Culture”, at Moscow City University of Psychology and Education.
This experience was a challenge that stimulated me to grow professionally, and immediately revealed
both the strong and weak points of the teaching principles that I used. It made me realize that nonintegrated methods of teaching English and Culture were insufficient, and I needed to learn some
special skills in order to teach more effectively.
Teaching CLIL in higher education has special characteristics. In my case, teaching a CLIL course was
required by the Psychology Department. I had to be exact in my use of definitions and terminology
during lessons, and point out the differences between cultural and psychological approaches to them
(e.g., different interpretations of perception, platonization, etc.). To achieve our goals, we applied
some of the central principles of CLIL such as Cognition, Content, and Culture (with primary focus on
Cognition). This was reflected in the types of language we used (general academic, subject-specific,
content-obligatory, accompanied by functional language and process language, with additional
sections for explanations and practical exercises). When difficult subjects were encountered, I found it
useful to be flexible and switch from L2 to L1, explaining certain terms in order to make sure they
were understood correctly by all students.
Though the majority of my students had sufficient cultural knowledge, their level of English proficiency
varied from A2 to C1, which often made working in a group difficult. Consequently, I had to adapt to
their level of proficiency and pay more attention to explaining grammar rules and extending their
vocabulary. We also needed additional activities and materials that could be readily understood by
everyone in the class. To ensure that their English proficiency met requirements, we focused on the
core principle of Communication and concentrated on such cognitive oral activities as pyramid
discussions, jigsaw technique, various games, and more. These activities made it possible for
everyone to participate and encouraged the students to improve their communicative English
language skills.
Finally, despite the variety of special CLIL resources on the internet, pre-packaged courses are not
readily available, sometimes making lesson preparation more difficult. My solution has been to edit,
revise and compile from the most useful of these internet-based resources.
Even though CLIL courses are relatively new to the Institute, much has been accomplished during my
experience there. The variety of subjects taught this way was extended from two to five. The
teachers achieved method competence and now receive access to the largest electronic libraries
available.
In the future, I believe CLIL will help to advance the teaching of many subjects in Russia, and as a
result, such ongoing problems as student proficiency attainment levels, integrated approaches to
subject-specific teaching, and unification of assessment criteria will finally be solved.