From Drills to CLIL: The Paradigmatic and Methodological Evolution Towards the Integration of Content and Foreign Language

Abstract

Content and language integrated learning has become a common practice in European higher education. In this paper, I aim to describe how this integrated teaching practice comes as a result of a paradigmatic and pedagogical evolution. For this purpose, the main linguistic paradigms will be revisited diachronically, followed by a revision of the main pedagogical trends in teaching English as a second language. This theoretical overview culminates in a predominantly constructivist practice that is more pragmatic and contextualized than ever before. From a language teacher’s standpoint and in language university classrooms, content and language integrated learning comes to solve the forever present decontextualization.

Keywords

• Content and language integrated learning
• constructivism
• contextualization
• paradigm
• pragmatics
• English teaching techniques