The Project English Plus: a CLIL approach in a Portuguese school

• Author(s): Ana Raquel Simões ; Ana Sofia Pinho ; Ana Margarida Costa ; Ana Rita Costa
• Date: 2013
• Origin: Indagatio Didactica
• Subject(s): CLIL approach; English Foreign Language; History; perceptions; plurilingual and intercultural education.
• Document Type: Article

Description

The CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) approach is still sparse in Portugal, being implemented only in a few schools. Despite this panorama, a Portuguese school developed the project English Plus based on the CLIL approach, which was implemented with a class of 7th grade students, and combined the nonlinguistic subject of History with English as a Foreign Language. In order to sustain the project, the school established partnerships, namely with a Higher Education Institution. One of this institution’s tasks was the monitoring of the project, particularly regarding the opinions of students, tutors/parents, teachers and school managers about it.This article presents a description of such opinions collected by means of questionnaires and interviews. The main findings indicate that the several educational actors seem to have a confluent opinion of the potentialities of the project and the CLIL approach, particularly in terms of: students’ development of linguistic and communicative competences, attitudes towards languages and Otherness, and increasing knowledge of History; teachers’ professional development; the overall community’s (particularly, the tutors/parents) interest and participation in the school activities; the creation of interdisciplinary synergies within school and implementation of networks and partnerships with society.