Innovation in Language Learning

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) has been gaining increasing ground over the last two decades. In the context of an obvious tendency towards the internationalization of study programmes across Europe, we witness a spread in the implementation of academic study with English as a working language. Therefore, an increased interest in the improvement of content-based language acquisition is justified. In this paper we advocate the usefulness of corpus-based approaches to teaching and learning. Specialized electronic corpora and adjacent tools are deemed to have the potential of offering fast access to reliable texts conceived by native speakers in the respective fields of study. The benefits range between simple searches for specialized terminology to acquiring information in terms of content knowledge, but they are also related to the use and usage of language items. The main advantages of corpora stem from the possibility to obtain contextualized information from authentic and reliable texts, where contextualization offers a structured retrieval of a language item in all the available contexts provided by the corpus.

A package of a multilingual open-ended corpus and electronic tools to enable handy on-line access to the corpus content is believed to be considerably helpful in balancing between content and language acquisition in international higher education. The usefulness of the corpus extends much beyond the area of CLIL so as to ultimately enhance intercultural communication in the priority scientific areas across study programmes in Europe. Corpus-based CLIL is also envisaged to have a formative effect both on non-native English speaking students and trainers. For the former, it stimulates the autonomy of learning outside classroom settings, thereby having a highly motivational effect and fostering cognitive activities. For the latter category, i.e. the educators, reliable and authentic corpora can enhance their linguistic abilities in direct relation with the content knowledge they possess. By means of corpora and electronic tools, translation can also be practiced by non-native lecturers since they resort to it in order to create materials and content lectures in English. The writing of teaching material based on corpora and corpus-based language learning have been suggested before, but we argue that specialized corpora along with some specific tools support CLIL at academic level.