Chapter One: Teaching (in) the Foreign Language in a CLIL Context: Towards a New Approach

1 IntroductionFor the past decade or so, CLIL programmes have found their way into the educational system in Spain (Ruiz de Zarobe & Lasagabaster 2010, p. ix), and nowadays play an important role in all phases of education, from infant education to university. During this period of time a great number of studies on the effect of CLIL on students' language levels have been carried out (see, for example, studies collected in Ruiz de Zarobe & Jimenez Catalan 2009 or Aragon Mendez 2006), some methodological proposals have been put forward (Dalton-Puffer 2006; Halbach 2008), and specific aspects such as the necessary teacher training (see, for example, studies collected in Lasagabaster & Ruiz de Zarobe 2010) or the teachers' conceptualization of what it means to teach in a bilingual setting (Pena & Porto 2008) have been studied. Conspicuously absent from this discussion, or focused on from an eminently linguistic point of view (e.g. Llinares, Morton & Whittaker 2012), is the foreign language itself and how its role changes in a CLIL context. And yet studying the approach to teaching the foreign language in CLIL contexts is important, as one of the main advantages of CLIL is that the language becomes a tool for communication and this has important implications for how it needs to be dealt with. Often, however, the attention of both researchers and teachers centres more on the necessary methodological change in the teaching of content subjects than on the way the teaching of the foreign language needs to change. In the present chapter I will try to highlight the challenges inherent in this change of approach and how they can be dealt with. To do so I will focus my attention on three of the main actors of bilingual education, namely the students, the foreign language teachers and the content teachers.2 Students in bilingual education programmes and the foreign languageOne of the important problems of English language teaching in Spain has always been that, even though being able to communicate in a foreign language rates high among the priorities of Spanish people, it has so far been impossible to develop this ability to a satisfactory level, even though language lessons start at the level of infant or primary education. As has been analysed elsewhere (Halbach in press), the reasons for this difficulty are varied, but prominently among them stands the fact that language teaching is focused on teaching about the language rather than on using it, so much so that many students coming to university to study English maintain that up to this moment they had never had the chance of speaking in English (Halbach 2002). This focus on the language as an object of study changes radically in a CLIL context where the foreign language becomes a working tool and a means for communication about other contents. Students need the language to be able to follow their content lessons and participate in them successfully, and this in turn means that their approach to, and motivation for, studying the foreign language changes drastically (for a more detailed description of the implications of this change see Naves 2009, p. 25-26). This change also has implications for the students' attitude towards the foreign language, as apart from the fact that they perceive it as a tool for communication, students approach it in a more intuitive and less intellectual way. This can be seen in the fact that students in bilingual education programmes stop taking the mother tongue as the starting point for both their learning and use of the foreign language, and start to function directly in the foreign language. This is reflected, for example, in the comments made by students on a bilingual degree in teacher training offered by the Escuela Universitaria Cardenal Cisneros (Alcala de Henares, Spain) who, in answer to the questions asked by a reporter from the local newspaper, explained: "I understand the subjects and see that I am making progress. …