Will I expect the learners to talk, either in pairs or groups or to respond to me
in the plenary classroom?
If I do, then I have to ask whether the students will be able to do that: will they, quite
simply, be able to find the words and put them together in sentences easily (it is not
likely, unless the teacher asks them to make extended oral presentations, that they
need to think too much about the text level)? Or will many of them struggle –
especially in groupwork – to talk in L2?
Will I require the class to read about the subject at any point? And if so, will
they be able to do so adequately?
If the answer is that some may struggle with the text, the teacher needs to check
whether there are word- and text-level difficulties in it which will cause this: is the
vocabulary unfamiliar and is the text hard to follow?
Will the students have to write – either in class or for homework? If so, will
they be able to produce the kind of text I expect?
If the answer is: not without help, then the teacher has to establish what kind of help
they will need with words which might be unfamiliar, with forming sentences correc tly
and easily, and with organising them coherently in a text.
b) Language support
Put like this, it may seems as if the subject teacher has a lot to think about – even in
one lesson – and that many of these problems are ones to which they may not have
obvious answers. They may also quite properly presume that it is not their job to deal
with all these problems: their language colleagues are better placed to do so – and
we will return to this question below. The difficulty is that most of the biggest
language problems have to be solved within this lesson, because if they are not, the
learners will not learn the subject matter. So there is often no escape!
In fact what happens in CLIL lessons is that, as we mentioned above, teachers do
teach and learners learn. In other words they solve these problems as they go along.
Teachers gradually become skilled at anticipating language barriers and the process
of planning lessons to overcome them becomes routine, rather than laboured. And
they gradually accumulate the new strategies which they need for providing support.
What are the main support strategies they use?
Support strategies for listening
To help learners listen, subject teachers highlight or explicitly teach vocabulary. At
the text level they help learners to follow them by using visuals and by adjusting their
talking style: they enumerate points, give examples, explain, summarise, more then
they would in L1.
Support strategies for speaking
To help students talk in the plenary classroom, they adjust their questions (asking,
perhaps, some cognitively demanding but short answer questions); they prompt (for
example they start learners’ responses for them); they provide vocabulary, they may
allow some L1 responses. To help them talk in groups, they provide support at the
word level by listing key words to use; to help with making sentences they can offer