To me there are two major categories of needs, (1) universal- a standard and common form of knowledge necessary for effective implementation of CLIL. Namely they would be (a) content knowledge, for e.g. language skills, grammar etc. and (b) technical and technological knowledge to enable effective use of any hardware and software used for CLIL. (2) regional- the needs of community where CLIL is implemented which would involve the socio-cultural aims of education for the society.

Hello Laura Pons Segui,

Notably, CLIL emerged as a response to the demands made by new globalized societies on education . Its main objective is  to prepare students for multilingual globalized spaces in which they they need  to communicate with the people who do not speak their own native language.  As a dual approach to language and subject area or content learning in an integrated way, CLIL has been regarded as an educational approach for involving students in  an engagingly rich cross curricular stream of  bilingual education.

Indubitably, the most significant training meed for CLIL teachers is related to teacher involvement in the process of teaching and learning for several reasons. First, such teachers need to  create a useful ground for cooperation with  teachers of other curricular subjects in order to help learners to see the interconnection between subjects and their inter-dependencies. Second,  they should become aware of the fact that meaningful co-operation and collaboration can ultimately help them to reap the benefits of the curriculum and promote their own professional development. Third, they should become aware of the opportunities developed out of the  shared vision existing among teachers and managers through meaningful collaborations at all levels of curriculum design can facilitate the attainment of the outcomes more easily. Therefore, in my country the  main challenge is to ensure that the students should acquire the content knowledge and the linguistic goals , and this is only possible, if they learn the principles of cooperation and collaboration.

Best regards,

R. Biria

CLIL has been implemented in my country, Vietnam, for a few years. I don't think there was a good preparation, especially teachers for this new trend. The problem is that teachers are qualified in content (science subjects) but not in English language. So for successful implementation, I think teachers should be well-prepared. 

Hi everyone, 

Thank you for your participation and your interesting comments. In my opinion, and based on the context where I am, I believe that teachers need more knowledge on both language and content, but I also think that this is not enough. First, because this does not solve the integration problem. Second, because this is a characteristic of individual teachers, but technically the CLIL project  should involve the whole school members. Therefore, as Reza Bira said, collaboration and cooperation become crucial. Third, knowing the content and the language does not make you necessarily a good CLIL teacher, as some of you pointed. 

I would say that knowing the content and the language of instruction are a basic requirement, but other competences need to be developed during teacher qualification.