GRETA Granada (Spain): Round Table on Bilingualism

Moderator: Antonio Vicente Casas Pedrosa

Participants: María Jesús Fregols, Diana Hicks, Marisa Pérez Cañado, Victor Pavón, Natividad Martínez Marin

For the main part of this session, each speaker had twelve minutes to give their thoughts on how effective CLIL has been thus far, what the challenges ahead are, and finally, how ICT can or should be integrated. Among the issues and concerns expressed were:

-         How CLIL is working through the system into higher education (teacher training for CLIL at university level, and the problems of certification), and a projected regional (Andalucía) Masters in CLIL.

-         How CLIL can avoid being elitist, and how we can avoid unhelpful comparisons with apparently ideal models (“the spectre of Finland”); the political hijacking of bilingualism for elitist flagship programmes.

-         The issues of coordination between the various practitioners and stake holders.

-         How ICT is necessary, given the dearth of suitable published material (and the impossibility of there ever being any).

-         Research into the effectiveness of CLIL and provisional results to date.

-         The L2 attainment ambition for CLIL programmes being functional competence rather than native-like competence.

-         The positive effect of CLIL programmes on teacher morale.

There was some time at the end for questions and comments from the audience.