The dilemmas of experimental CLIL in Catalonia

ABSTRACT

In the early twenty-first century Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) emerged as a distinctively European pedagogy for raising additional language competence. Although CLIL scholarship has been abundant and has taken many different directions, there is a dearth of ethnographic research to shed light on the situated ambivalences of CLIL policymaking. This paper aims to fill the existing gap by analysing in detail the complex interlocking dilemmas faced by all stakeholders (including policy makers and parents) at a Catalan state secondary school (Spain) and the ways in which they were navigated. Through a focused analysis of actors’ discourse, triangulated with long-term classroom observations and a variety of other ethnographic data, the study argues that, despite the school’s praiseworthy efforts at capitalising its students through English, CLIL did not achieve its full potential. This is attributed to the absence of explicitly-set and graded linguistic goals. Such absence is said to be shaped by the intersection of the experimental nature of the policy and long-standing linguistic ideologies in Catalan education. The article warns about the consequences of such indeterminacy for the democratising agenda of CLIL.

KEYWORDS:

• CLIL
• Catalan education
• ethnography of language policy
• language ideologies
• oral output

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This fieldwork was part of the APINGLO-Cat project, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICCIN, ref. FFI2014-54179-C2-1-P), of which I was Principal Investigator. I would like to acknowledge here the support with data collection of Adriana Patiño (with whom I conducted the focus groups with students, extracts of which are shown here), as well as of Jessica McDaid, Elisabet Pladevall and Andrea Sunyol. Iris Milán and Dani Pujol were an invaluable support with data transcription. I am also grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback. I take responsibility for any remaining flaws.

2 For a collection of papers on the Catalan education model, see Arnau (2013).

3 GEP and other initiatives to foster plurilingualism in Catalan schools are framed within the so-called Catalan government ‘strategy’ Framework for Plurilingualism, available from: http://xtec.gencat.cat/ca/projectes/plurilinguisme/. The rationale, goals and forms of implementation of this policy are fully described in the document El model linguistic del sistema educatiu de Catalunya, published in 2018 (Subdirecció General de Llengua i Plurilingüisme 2018).

4 We obtained clearance for our data collection protocol from the UAB Ethics Committee (ref. 3631_s). All the names that appear in this article are pseudonyms.

5 Permanent teachers in the public sector are civil servants in Spain, which means they have passed an official examination (oposición). To fill vacancies, appointments are made of non-permanent teachers on an annual basis provided they have the required qualifications. The appointment system has traditionally been centralised (i.e. not in the hands of schools) though it is now in the process of changing in some regions.

6 In this context, I use L1 to refer to both Catalan and Spanish. Although most students came from Spanish-speaking homes, Catalan was their language of schooling, and thus, in many cases, when an academic frame was activated, they would intervene in Catalan.

7 The school did not think the students’ level of English was high enough to have both classes taught in that language. The teachers’ decision to select students for the CLIL group was motivated by students’ manifested reluctance to enrol in that particular class.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad: [Grant Number FFI2014-54179-C2-1-P].