Innovation in Language Learning

This paper is aimed at clarifying whether CLIL should adopt a specific pedagogy, as often implied in the literature, like the primary social constructivism, or whether both the same literature and practitioners would pave the way for the adoption of CLIL as an open environment for various pedagogies. Indeed, this question seems crucial, because if different pedagogies are known by teachers CLIL would become flexible to the needs of different stakeholders in practice. Moreover, CLIL teacher training should include this broad pedagogical competence, converging with that concerning different linguistic approaches, in order to make teachers aware of their options in relation to the needs of their classroom. An earlier study on the training gaps of CLIL teachers indicated a great need for pedagogical foundations and then specifically for pedagogy and didactics for CLIL. Based on these findings, there was the preparatory training of three groups of teachers from three Italian Licei Linguistici, engaged in critical participatory action research, left free in their pedagogical and linguistic choices for their implementations, alone or through teams, after a blended short training. During their implementations, they varied the pedagogy along with the linguistic approaches to CLIL depending on the attitudes of their students, their own or those of the team involved, confirming the rare voice of practitioners in the literature and calling for this broader possibility, in contrast to the majority of CLIL research which tends to recommend one specific pedagogy or another.

Keywords: CLIL, pedagogies, teacher training.

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