Low-attaining beginners do better than we think in CLIL

Abstract

CLIL is still often described as ‘elitist’ which results in the exclusion of beginners or low-attaining students from bilingual programmes. Recently, the public school in Buchrain has broken new ground by teaching English to beginners at primary level with additional CLIL lessons. The analysis of the questionnaires and interviews with learners allocated to three groups of varied English levels revealed that the group of low-attaining pupils appreciate the additional CLIL lessons most and the majority of these learners affirmed that speaking in CLIL class is easier than in normal English lessons. These findings together with promising lesson observations voiced by the teachers are strong indicators that CLIL with beginners, regardless of their level of English, works.

Keywords

• CLIL
• bilingual teaching
• low-attaining learners
• case pupils
• mask effect