Content and Language Integrated Learning (Clil) – Just Another Off-Shoot of Communicative Language Teaching or a Post-method Foreign-Language Pedagogy on Its Own Terms?

Abstract

As the CLIL approach is regularly represented in recently published primary-school English coursebooks used in Slovenia, this paper examines the emerging issues of teaching content in the foreign language classroom. It addresses the question of the extent to which the traditional fragmentation of teaching content has been replaced by integration or fusion between language and content across school subjects. It aims to provide analytical data on whether, and to what extent, the CLIL content has really synthesized past methodologies into a crossover educational paradigm on its own term, and thus replaced fragmentation, or whether it has remained on the level of CLIL ‘pigeonholes’, i.e. occasional CLIL content/activities added haphazardly for the sake of variety. In the analysis, the focus is first on the various definitions of CLIL, which then shifts to the acronym breakdown, offering a unique insight into the CLIL components. In closing, the article encourages the use of the CLIL approach in a systematic and continuous manner, promoting it as a way of incorporating the concept of fusion into the English language classroom, critically recognizing the assumptions and values underpinning CLIL and its methodology as relatable and manageable aspects of effective foreign language instruction.