YOUNG LEARNERS' PERCEPTIONS ON LEARNING LANGUAGES THROUGH CLIL AND ICT

Headnote

Abstract: Content and Language Integrated Learning has been widely recognized as an effective teaching approach in the field of foreign language teaching. It has been implemented in schools throughout Europe over the last 15 years in order to foster multilingualism from the early ages. In Turkey's context, teaching foreign languages to young learners via establishing effective pedagogical approaches is still among the challenges to be met. In search for such an approach, the study was conducted to find out the impacts of learning English through CLIL and ICT. The present paper presents the opinions of Turkish young learners toward learning a foreign language through CLIL and ICT.

Keywords: young learners, content and language integrated learning, information and communication technology.

INTRODUCTION

In Turkey, teaching foreign languages to young learners (TFYL) was first introduced in 1997 [16]. Although promoting foreign language learning at early ages has been one of the priorities of Ministry of Education [16] since then, research has frequently reported that several challenges are yet to be overcome to reach the desired outcomes [1, 11, 12, 17, 18, and 23]. In addition to infrastructural, social and other quantitative hindrances, pedagogical considerations such as adapting an appropriate teaching approach which is specifically geared toward the characteristics and needs of young learners are still among these challenges. In search for an alternative pedagogical approach for TFYL, the present study attempts to evaluate the impacts of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) approach in TFYL context. The study involved working with the CLIL platform prepared for the project, European CLIL Resource Center for Web 2.0. Education: Early-to-Longlife Languages Learning (Reference no: 504671-LLP-1-2009-1-ES-Comenius-CMP) [26]. It has created a Virtual European CLIL Resource Center (e-CLIL RC) which includes:

I. draftmethodology guidelines for young learner teachers who are willing to employ the CLIL approach in class,

II. an engaging storyline developed in the form of an e-book in order to provide a meaningful context,

III. a number of ICT-based interactive tasks and games inserted within the storyline to support learning a foreign language and some specific science subjects such as matter and solar system.

1. DEFINITION OF CLIL

CLIL has become an increasingly popular pedagogic approach. It has been recommended alongside claims that...