Do you CLIL?

Second half of term began with a pedagogical day. This is Eurospeak for in-service training, And I found myself in a lecture about CLIL, that is Content and Language Integrated Learning. This turns out to be teaching a subject to pupils through one of their foreign languages, History in English to native French speakers, for example. In French this educational phenomenon is referred to as EMILE (L’enseignement d’une matière intégré à une langue étrangère) with a nice reference to Rousseau. After a bit of this lively lecture (given by a guest lecturer: details here: http://www.vub.ac.be/FOST/fost_in_english/leden_pvdc_eng.htm) I began to realise I had been here before and I recalled some articles I had actually written on this subject in an earlier incarnation. It wasn’t called CLIL then but some other acronym, but basically it was the same: teaching through a second language towards a subject. I had been more interested in the sociological effects of this on the pupils: what German speakers made of being taught the history of the Second World War in English, by a British teacher in a mixed class with French, Italian and Dutch fellow-pupils, for example. I had seen this as having a Europeanizing effect on the youngsters, breaking down old prejudices and nationalisms in the search for objectivity and a touch of reconciliation. But it turns out that CLIL is not the answer to Europe’s old political problems but it is a way of increasing schoolchildren’s performance. Those who learn Mathematics using a CLIL methodology do better on their tests. (I suspect this means Belgians doing Maths in English in practice, but that’s another question.) And all this in the lecture, with added neuroscience. It was illustrated by those brightly-coloured brain scan pictures you often see in newspaper articles, which it is claimed show different areas of brain activity. I had a vision of schoolchildren being fed into an MRI machine and then being made to do Maths problems while they were lying flat inside a metal tube with electrodes fitted to their heads, but I’m sure it’s not like that really. It was all down to concept forming apparently. When the pupils are tackling these problems through a second language they form the concept more precisely, because they are having to think about what they are doing in a more objective manner than they would if they could do it more automatically through the medium of their first language. Then I began to think: isn’t this exactly what teachers in the past used to claim for Latin? The act of learning abstract language skills (nouns, verbs, accidence, syntax and so on) through the medium of the first language but applied to another separate language made the concepts more easily understood and consequently retained. So all that time spent on Latin grammar was not such a waste of time after all. But what did the old teachers of past centuries know? They were using what the lecturer called pre-scientific thinking about education; they didn’t have those nice pictures of bright blobs in the brain. Classics teachers would be regarded as hopelessly old-fashioned to claim such benefits for studying Latin today: we have to justify Classical studies on cultural and European grounds instead. CLIL on the other hand gets results. A criticism often aimed at Latin is that it is only for the better performing pupils. But what if it is the other way round: that those who do Latin perform better because of it, as a result of the CLIL effect? Will Latin then be at the forefront of modern educational thinking? With added neuroscience?