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Oh what a feeling!
Using Toyota as acase study to teachYear 9 CLIL Economics
and Business
JESSICA BRETHERTON
Department of Education and Training (Vic)

Abstract
This paper documents my efforts to turn a personal trip to the Toyota factory in Aichi into an engaging CLIL (Content andLanguage Integrated Learning) unit of work for students in my Year 9 Japanese class. Using the Year 9 Economics andBusiness curriculum as a starting point, students studied the history of the Toyota company, its business model and work
ethic, the progression of environmentally-friendly cars and compared advertising success in Japan and Australia. Students
even got a tour of the local Toyota dealership, met mechanics and sales people and went for a test drive in the latest
models. The unit culminated in the students returning to the Toyota dealership and using real Toyota cars to film TV ads inJapanese. This was an incredible effort from students from a typically low-performing regional high school, and provedthat CLIL can work anywhere.

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Introduction
After successfully implementing a Year 9 Economics and Business CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) unit
at my school, I wanted to show other teachers that CLIL was achievable irrespective of the background and achievementlevels of both the teacher and the students. Content Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is a dual-focused educational
approach in which the target language (in this instance, Japanese) is used for both the learning and teaching processes.
The focus is not only on the language, nor only on the content, as they are both interwoven (Coyle, Hood and Marsh 2010, 1).
It is incredible. It is engaging. It is meaningful. In the case of my school, the CLIL unit had a direct positive impact on retentionof students in senior language classes, as the Year 10 Japanese class the next year was the biggest ever. In the instanceof my unit, Japanese was used as the language to explore aspects of the Year 9 Economics and Business curriculum. CLIL
has the ability to transform the way you teach and the way your students learn. However, it is misunderstood by many. And
it is a lot of work. In the presentation this paper is based on, I delivered a mini CLIL lesson for other teachers to understandwhat a CLIL lesson feels like, talked through the curriculum, showed the final assessment pieces of the CLIL unit, andshared all of the resources I had created so that teachers were able to teach this unit to their own classes.

Background
School backgroundAt the time of delivering this program, I was working at a large regional secondary school in Victoria with approximately
1,300 students. Despite these huge numbers, Japanese only had four or five students continuing on to VCE, and the otherlanguage had not run a senior class in several years. Almost half the school population was classified as coming fromvery low socio-economic backgrounds, and literacy and numeracy levels were well below national averages. Despite this,thanks to a concerted recruitment effort by the language department, Japanese had three classes at the Year 9 level forthe first time ever—two elective classes and one compulsory Select Entry Accelerated Learning (SEAL) stream. Japanesein Year 10 was timetabled against electives in Surfing and Automotive—it was an uphill battle to encourage students totake the leap to senior Japanese, but I was determined to do something different. Given CLIL’s focus on both language andcontent, CLIL seemed like the perfect way to combine Japanese with a topic the students could be actively engaged inand boost senior school numbers. The focus here was not on achieving standards, as the Year 9 curriculum had alreadybeen completely taught by Term 4, but rather on students enjoying language classes and empowering them to acquire
knowledge while actively engaging and developing their own powers of perception, communication and reasoning (Coyle,
Hood and Marsh 2010, 6). As I had never taught using this methodology before, and the students had already completed
the prescribed Year 9 curriculum, I had no specific goals I needed to achieve; this CLIL unit was simply an opportunity to
explore a completely new methodology and learning style for both the students and myself. I wanted students to look backpositively on the experience, and to inspire some of them to continue on to Senior Japanese.

Unit of work backgroundThe year prior I had been honoured to participate in the Aichi-Victoria Teacher Exchange. When I was in Aichi on exchange,
my partner teacher took me to visit one of the Toyota plants. I wanted to see Japan’s number-one export from an economic
point of view, but given I view cars as simply a way to get from Point A to Point B, I did not think I would be particularlyinterested in the cars themselves. How wrong I was! The whole process was enthralling and I wanted to know more. It
immediately hit me that the manufacturing, business and environmental impacts of Toyota would make a great topic tostudy with my Year 9 students when we looked at transport. But the more I looked into it, the more I realised Toyota wasworthy of its own standalone subject.
About six months after I visited the Toyota factory, I studied the Bastow Institute’s CLIL course, which I found so informativeand inspiring. CLIL focuses on the interrelation between content, communication, cognition and culture. It is an educational
theory that came out of Europe in the mid-1990s, based on language education in Canada that saw mainstream curriculum
content delivered in the target language (Cross and Gearon 2013, 6). Research has shown that the benefits of CLIL include
academic achievement matching first-language instruction, positive gains in first-language literacy and heightened levelsof cultural awareness (Cross and Gearon 2013). It goes without saying that my program was much more modest thanestablished CLIL programs both in Australia and overseas, but I believed even just a CLIL taster would result in positive
benefits for my students.

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Toyota seemed like the perfect topic for CLIL—rich and engaging, deeply entrenched in Japanese culture, and also wellknown to my regional students. Initially, I was unsure which subject to teach the content through. I looked at the obvious
places like Technology and Science, but the curriculum did not really seem relevant to Toyota. I broadened my search andlooked at the curriculum for all subjects, and Business and Economics seemed like a great fit. The Victorian Business andEconomics Curriculum at Levels 9 and 10 looks at the nature of innovation and how businesses seek to create and maintaina competitive edge in local and global markets, as well as how enterprising behaviours and capabilities can be developed
to improve work and business environments (VCAA 2019). Given that Toyota is the world’s number one car manufacturer
in terms of production output (IOMVM 2019), it seemed like a great case study to explore innovation and competitiveness inbusiness. Although the unit changed, resulting in less of a business and economics focus by its end, this was definitely theinspiration and a real focus at the beginning. Conveniently, I am also a trained Humanities teacher, so felt more comfortableteaching my first CLIL unit with content that I understood.

Program
I taught CLIL four lessons per week for 50 minutes each lesson in Term 4 to both Year 9 Japanese elective classes.
The CLIL unit went for about six weeks, before camp, exams and transition began. In our first lesson, I explained in English
what CLIL was all about, and the students discussed their fears and hesitations around it. As my aim was to teach the vast
majority of the unit in Japanese, it was important we discussed some strategies for the students as a class, and as a result
most people’s fears were assuaged. I privately spoke to a few of the extremely weak students in the class, and told them
if at any point they wanted me to speak in English with them, I would quietly do so. This was important and empoweringin order to get the whole class on board. I did eventually speak some English in class, especially when explaining theassessment task, but initially I had the goal to use 100% Japanese in class.
Initially we looked at the history of Toyota, and used this to reinforce the use of past tense. Students completed timeline
activities before moving on to the company’s name change and the business decisions behind it. Students then designed
their own logos to use for the original company name Toyoda. We next looked at Toyota’s innovative environmentallyfriendly technology, which provided a lot of katakana practice. Students completed simple comparison activities about thedifferences and similarities between electric and petrol cars, before discussing and voting on whether electric cars werea good idea in our small regional town. The class decided ultimately the answer was no, as electric cars currently cannot
drive long distances, and are therefore unsuitable for regional areas in Australia. All of the resources were sourced online
using a combination of information from Toyota’s websites and advertising materials, Japanese media, and my own visit
to the Toyota factory.
At this point in the unit I arranged for my classes to visit the local Toyota dealership. The dealership allowed us to tour
their workshop, where the mechanics talked us through what they did (the students were very excited to see the police
car getting a service!), and we also got to tour the showroom and look under the bonnet of both a petrol and an eco car,comparing the engines and asking questions. Finally, the students were able to roam around the car yard, sitting in thecars and picking their favourites. For many of the students this was the first time they had ever been in a brand new car,and they felt very privileged. The fact that the students’ small town had a real and meaningful connection to such a huge
multinational Japanese company was a revelation for many students, and provided a very practical way to incorporate
another aspect of the Business and Economics curriculum—investigating Australia as a trading nation and discovering
its place within Asia and the global economy (VCAA 2019). The dealership was very accommodating and helpful to us,
and I am sure many others would be, too.
Back in the classroom, the students examined advertising for Toyota cars in Australia and Japan. We watched a few
different Toyota television commercials from both Japan and Australia, and the students described, using simple adjectives,
their thoughts about the advertising. We focused on the emotions behind the advertising, and questioned what Toyota
wanted us to feel when we watched the commercials. The students once again completed Venn diagrams comparing
and contrasting the similarities and differences between advertising in Australia and Japan, before receiving their main
assessment task for the unit: students were to write and film their own Toyota television commercial, in Japanese.
The most exciting part was that the dealership invited us back to film these in real Toyota cars. Students wrote scripts ingroups unassisted, and had them corrected by me. We returned to the dealership to film the commercials, then had quite
a few lessons in the computer lab to edit and subtitle them.

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On the due date, we had a film screening where all students watched one another’s commercials and provided feedback.
The best were both funny and clever, and showed a real understanding of the studies we had done on Toyota. The students
were very proud of their efforts, and so was I. The Toyota dealership was impressed by the student output as well,finding some of the videos hilarious, and was keen to continue the program the following year. I showed some of thebest commercials to my students in lower year levels, who were engaged and already anticipating being able to film theirown when they chose to study Year 9 Japanese. It was a real affirming moment for me, that CLIL had worked in termsof motivating students to get engaged in language learning. The students also improved their speaking skills thanks to thecommercials, and were more confident in their listening skills thanks to constant exposure to listening to Japanese in theclassroom.

Benefits and pitfalls
Benefits
I thoroughly enjoyed teaching this unit, and most of my students enjoyed studying it. At the end of the CLIL unit, 25 of the
28 students completed a Survey Monkey survey. Sixty-two percent agreed or strongly agreed with the statement ‘I haveenjoyed learning about Toyota’, while 25% gave the noncommittal neutral response. Sixty-four percent agreed or strongly
agreed with the statement ‘I enjoy video assessment tasks’. Less than 10% agreed with the statement ‘I regret choosing
to study Japanese in Year 9’. Year 9 Japanese comprises two electives, and was timetabled against some very attractive
electives like Surfing and Campfire Cooking, and so I would argue this was a win for language learning.
At the end of the survey, students were able to leave optional comments, all of which were positive. I have included twocomments here, with original spelling, capitalisation and punctuation.
	Japanese was enjoyable this year, I had fun learning about Toyota and its history, I also liked doing thevideo assessments, I learnt a lot of japanese this year that I didnt know already and I had lots fun in classthis year.
I love japanese. i am kind of regreting that i didnt choose it and i will miss my sensei.

Pitfalls
CLIL is an extremely time-intensive way to teach. I was lucky to have a three-term curriculum I was required to teach toYear 9, and had the freedom to determine the curriculum in the shortened fourth term. Without this free rein, as well as theunderstanding of my colleagues, I would not have been able to implement this CLIL unit. Additionally, CLIL requires a great
deal of content creation by the teacher. You are obliged to search for authentic materials that students can access at theirown level, or create your own. There needs to be more understanding and support of this, as well as better networking
around the country, in order for teachers to share CLIL units that others can implement.
Some limitations meant that students did not spend enough time on environmentally-friendly technology, and I did nottouch as much on business models and practices as I had originally wanted, as I believed the students did not have enoughlanguage skills. If I were to teach the unit again, I would need to critically reflect upon the content and restructure it.

Conclusion
A few months after teaching this unit with great success, I left teaching for a period of time. Upon returning, I moved toteaching primary Japanese. I wholeheartedly believe CLIL is a wonderful way to engage students and make language
learning authentic and meaningful, and have continued to implement smaller CLIL units in my primary classes. As for my
Toyota unit, I do not know how many students ultimately continued their Japanese language studies through to Year 12, but
I do know that the year after my Year 9 CLIL success the Year 10 Japanese class had its biggest enrolment ever. There wasa greater depth of content covered in these CLIL classes than in typical textbook topics, and I believe my students’ learning
was better because of it. I strongly encourage teachers curious about CLIL to give it a go.

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References
Coyle, D., P. Hood and D. Marsh. 2010. CLIL Content and Language Integrated Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cross, R. and M. Gearon. 2013. Research and Evaluation of the Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) Approach to Teaching and Learning
Languages in Victorian Schools. Melbourne: Melbourne Graduate School of Education.
IOMVM (International Organisation of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers). 2019. 2017 Production Statistics. Accessed 16 July, 2019.
http://www.oica.net/category/production-statistics/2017-statistics.
VCAA (Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority). 2019. Economics and Business - Scope and Sequence. Accessed 16 July, 2019.
https://victoriancurriculum.vcaa.vic.edu.au/the-humanities/economics-and-business/introduction/scope-and-sequence.

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