English language teaching

Key Words: English for Tourism Studies, English for Specific Academic Purposes, CLIL in Higher Education, CLIL in Multilingual Education, CLIL Research

The presentation describes the evolution of a CLIL course for students enrolled in the trilingual (English, Italian, German) Bachelor’s program in Tourism, Sport and Event Management at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano in South Tyrol, Italy. The presentation begins by describing how a course based on the concept of English for Specific Academic Purposes unintentionally transformed into CLIL due to the trilingual learning context and the application of a task-based, communicative approach. Building upon this experience, the presentation offers a novel definition of CLIL which differentiates between CLIL at the theoretical, institutional, curricular and instructional levels and which proposes that at the instructional level, rather than CLIL being an “umbrella term” for various content-based approaches to language instruction, CLIL is a specific type of content-based instruction in which content learning and language learning are concurrent and reciprocal. Based on this definition, CLIL at the instructional level is not analogous with study abroad, immersion, or content instruction in L2, nor is it the same thing as teaching languages for specific purposes, academic purposes or specific academic purposes. But such language learning contexts are situated on a “CLIL fault line” in which students’ cognitive resources can be interchangeably applied to new content and new language features, and, when the conditions are right, are applied to both simultaneously. Finally, the presentation will briefly list some of the limitations of the course and outline an exploratory study based on ethnographic research methods that will be conducted during the 2014-15 academic year in order to better assess the needs of the students and the linguistic demands of the degree program with the aim of furthering such integration of language learning and content learning at the instructional level across the curriculum.

The presentation describes an Upper Intermediate (B2+) English course designed for students enrolled in the trilingual (German, Italian and English) Bachelor’s program in Tourism, Sport and Event Management at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano as an example of English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP) in praxis. The presentation outlines the specific needs of the students, the methodological principles of the course design, lesson plans and assessment procedures, and the role of the course in the curriculum of the degree program, in which approximately one-half of content courses are taught in English. The course represents a synthesis of (a) task-based, communicative language teaching, (b) teaching to the proficiency standards of the Common European Framework, (c) meeting the specific English language needs of a unique learning context, and (d) fostering the development of life-long, autonomous learners of English. A sample lesson and sample exam will be provided to demonstrate the process used to develop lessons and test students.

This paper discusses sequenced materials development for content/language integrated learning (CLIL) in a team-taught Content/English introductory philosophy class at Miyazaki International College (MIC), Japan. A short introduction situates the authors’ particular CLIL approach, one developed for an English as a Second Language (ESL) environment in a Japanese liberal arts college. They then offer a template for a sequence of language exercises that are adaptable to a variety of discipline-specific content texts and lectures of varying degrees of language difficulty. The approach can be used in team-taught or solo-taught courses. The authors also reflect on implementing their materials in an active-learning classroom to enhance the CLIL advantages.