WELCOME TO THE
AILA CLIL REN
WHO WE ARE
Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) refers to educational approaches that allow for improved foreign language learning in combination with content learning in a variety of (non-language) subjects, e.g. Geography, History, Sports, Maths or, on the tertiary level, business, law or IT. CLIL has started as a European undertaking, but has found supporters on other continents as well. CLIL strongly relates to other contextualized language teaching approaches such as immersion education or content-based language teaching.
The 2018-2020 AILA CLIL ReN Convenors are: Russell Cross (The University of Melbourne), Ana Llinares (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid), and Letizia Cinganotto (Italian National Institute for Documentation, Innovation and Educational Research).
WHAT IS
THE CLIL REN?
Content and Language Integrated Learning has not only been a highly popular educational innovation in Europe and elsewhere, but it has also attracted a wide range of research interests and undertakings. The Research Network on Content and Language Integrated Learning and Immersion Classrooms (CLIL ReN) aims at joining expertise of CLIL researchers in language acquisition, language use, language pedagogy and subject pedagogy. This Research Network is supported by the International Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA) has been going strong since 2006. We hope that those of you engaged in research into CLIL will find issues of special interest to you and will also add your ideas and contributions, thus bringing the site to life.
WHAT DOES
THE CLIL REN DO?
The CLIL ReN is involved in the following activities:
Sending out Newsletters on CLIL-research related news and activities
Organizing annual research meetings
Editing thematic issues of publications related to these research meetings.
The annual meetings have provided an increasing number of members with the opportunity to engage in international exchange, disseminating their applied linguistic insights about classrooms where the teaching and learning of curricular content happens in and through foreign or second languages.
WHAT DO WE WANT TO DO IN COMING YEARS?
For 2018 - 2020, the ReN has ‘pedagogy’ as our collective theme. This includes a specific focus on sub-themes and research around the following three overlapping strands:
• CLIL and social justice (i.e., for more equitable and fairer experiences for learners, accounting for individual differences)
• CLIL as an instructional practice (i.e., across content domains and geographical contexts to strengthen collaborative work between language and content specialists)
• CLIL and instructional media (i.e., especially technologies, and how these might also help address issues of CLIL with social justice and content and language integration)
• CLIL as a multilingual space (i.e., translanguaging, and the teaching and learning of content in different linguistic settings)