CLIL: a challenge or an opportunity?

Anna Kolbuszewska

As language teachers we sometimes find ourselves having, or choosing, to teach content (subject matter) in our English classes. Conversely, our colleagues who are subject teachers may have to teach their subject through the medium of English. CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) became one of the big buzz words in education in the first decade of this century. But integrating language and content teaching is really nothing new: it has been successfully used in education for centuries and we do know quite a lot about how it works and why it works. In this talk we look at why CLIL has become such a hot topic in the 21st century and we will explore the challenges and opportunities that CLIL presents not only for our students but also for us, language teachers.