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3.2 Planning the curriculum
On the basis of an equal opportunities policy and to develop the European
dimension throughout the curriculum, it is beneficial for all students to
have at least some experience of CLIL during their school years.
However, the planning of the CLIL curriculum depends on the philosophy
of each school and on the image the school aims to offer to parents,
students and the local community. For example, a primary school may wish
to provide learners with a large range of extracurricular activities in each
field, in order that students can experience diversity and choose freely
between different areas. In this case, the school can offer short “linguistic
showers”, in a range of projects and workshops (computer skills, simple
scientific experiments, etc.). Other schools may wish to specialise in
modern languages, so they will introduce CLIL as complementary to
formal language teaching.
On the basis of the general goals of the school, CLIL can be introduced as a
part of mainstream curriculum or it can be offered only to some classes or
some groups of students, who choose it as an option. In some countries, only
students with good linguistic competence, either in the native language or in
the foreign language, and with good results in non-linguistic subjects, are
allowed to enrol in CLIL courses. But this elitist policy is not consistent with
the plurilingual principles, as stated in a number of European documents.
To plan the CLIL curriculum, it is necessary to define long-term goals and
to take into account:
a) the available resources, in terms of:
• teachers and their competences
• administrative support in the school
• materials and resources (handbooks, second language books, maga-
zines, newspapers, visual and multimedia materials, TV channels, …)
• local community resources (native speakers, exchanges with other
countries, business activities, …)
b) the number and typology of students: their age, needs, interests and
general linguistic competence
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