A critical content-and-language-integrated-learning (CLIL) approach to fostering students' critical awareness of social issues

Abstract

Content and language integrated learning (CLIL) is an educational approach adopted to teach content through an additional language of students. Thus, a CLIL approach aims to enhance learners’ foreign language competence and facilitate their acquisition of content knowledge. The bloom in the development of CLIL has contributed to fruitful results obtained from numerous studies which explored either the effects of CLIL on the subject matter and the target language, or the ways and difficulties of implementing such an approach. While the importance of CLIL has long been recognised, previous studies predominantly focused on its effectiveness for learning, and seemed to have overlooked its fundamental relevance to wider educational missions, i.e. envision language education as an approach to the advancement of society. Therefore, this research examines CLIL in terms of curriculum planning and practices through a critical pragmatic approach with the aim to propose guidelines for designing CLIL materials as a response to the needs of teachers and students and to facilitate primary and secondary school students’ learning of English and their enhancement of critical awareness of social issues. Underpinned by critical pedagogy and guided by the existing frameworks, models, and resources for developing CLIL curricula and materials, this study adopts the design-based research (DBR) approach to formulate guidelines for carrying out CLIL pedagogical planning and implementation. Four teachers at three schools, two of which are primary schools while the other one is a secondary school, participated in this study. Overall, it consisted of the preparation, implementation, and conclusion phases. In the implementation stage, one to two cycles were repeated for generating, designing, refining, and evaluating the guidelines and the materials. The data were obtained through document collection, non-participant observations, focus group interviews, semi-structured and unstructured interviews, and questionnaires, which were analysed via thematic content analysis. The findings show that the incorporation of critical pedagogy into the CLIL approach enhanced students’ motivation in English learning and their willingness to learn about society. This research also identifies the common challenges faced by teachers while planning and implementing CLIL. These challenges are categorised into contextual factors. Then, it formulates the findings into a set of eight guidelines in terms of the use of multimodal and multilingual resources, and the design of materials, grouping and activities. It also proposes the integration of conversational language into content learning as a springboard to reach the dual goals of CLIL. The main contribution lies in its attempt to link English language education with social responsibility by adopting a critical CLIL approach. The results could illuminate research in CLIL with a critical perspective and provide implications for the English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts.