Language learning in immersion and CLIL classrooms

Tarja Nikula & Karita Mård-Miettinen
Table of contents

Immersion education and CLIL (i.e. content and language integrated learning) are both forms of education that utilise a language other than learners’ first language (L1) as one of the languages of content instruction. They share the conviction that foreign/second language competence should not be regarded as a separate skill but one intertwined with students’ cognitive, conceptual and social development, best supported by engaging students in meaningful and cognitively and academically challenging language use; i.e. they represent ‘learning by using’ approaches (for a more detailed rationale for content-based language education, see Genesee & Lindholm-Leary 2013: 5–7). Immersion and CLIL have their origins in different geographical and socio-political contexts and in different points in time – immersion in Canada in the 1960s and CLIL in Europe in the 1990s. Even though both are closely connected to second and foreign language learning research, the temporal difference in their emergence also means that they partly draw on different research influences.

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