The CLIL context in Primary School : discovering the world through English

Abstract

As we all know nowadays, English learning is one of the fundamental goals in the Spanish educative system, since it is the language of the world and most of the contents and information we receive every day are in that language. Therefore, knowing English gives you many advantages, including the possibility to access new points of view, information sources or to communicate with people around the world, as well as many others. As a consequence, it seems that we are all obsessed with this matter: parents, politicians, schools; looking for the best method to make our kids sound like native speakers. Perhaps here starts our erroneous conception of English teaching, given that we expect our kids to reach a level which is hardly achievable. Hence, the poor English level that Spanish people following these programs have obtained in the last few years. Fortunately it seems that things are beginning to change and many new methods are more focused on a communicative approach (English as a tool and not as an end), such as the Context and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), created by David Marsh in 1994 (Marsh, Maljers and Hartiala, 2001), which is in vogue now. At this point, I would like to comment that my teaching proposal will follow this method, since in my Practicum I could observe and take part in some subjects that used it (Social Science, Natural Science, Arts and Crafts) and I found it very useful for children to know the world around them but also to learn English, as long as they are not worried about making mistakes when speaking or writing