supportive task types such as talking frames, sentence starters or substitution tables;
or they ask students to use their L1 when discussing but their L2 when reporting.
Support strategies for reading
To help students with reading they may check that they understand key vocabulary
before they read; they may provide them with pre-reading questions to reduce the
reading demands of the text; or they may offer help at the text level by giving reading
support tasks, such as a chart to fill in, a diagram to label, etc.
Support strategies for writing
To help them with writing, they can offer support at all three levels by providing a
vocabulary list, sentence starters, or a writing frame. They can also ensure that the
learners talk through their writing at the word, sentence and text level, with each
other, probably in L1, before they write.
These strategies amount to a different pedagogy from L1-medium teaching. When
you work in L1, you don’t often have to anticipate the language demands of lessons
in this way; neither do you have to provide much of this kind of language support.
CLIL has its own specific pattern of teaching and CLIL teachers have to learn it. It
means acquiring a new set of language-supportive task types, developing a different
quality of teacher-talk, using a variety of forms of interaction and knowing whether or
when to encourage the learners’ to use L1. These strategies will be familiar to
subject teachers who are experienced in working in L2. They often acquire many of
them simply by working them out for themselves. But many do not, and if they get no
training they may carry on struggling with some of these problems for longer than is
necessary.
Lesson planning in CLIL
Lesson planning in CLIL programmes requires teachers to anticipate language
problems and help learners solve them as they proceed through the lesson. Once
you accept that you have to do it, it becomes easier. If you get training to help you do
it, it becomes easier still. Finally, language teachers know – to an extent – how to do
these things. They haven’t normally been trained to provide help in L2-medium
subject lessons, but they have a lot of the skills which will help them solve these
problems. It is useful for subject teachers to collaborate with them, especially when
they start out teaching in L2, and to get early help with planning lessons. The more
they can get at this initial stage, the easier it is, with time, to incorporate simple
lesson-planning routines into normal CLIL practice and fairly quickly to work
independently with confidence.