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Forms of instruction that combine content teaching and language teaching are not a new topic in the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (see Crandall, 1992; Snow, 1998; Spanos, 1989; Stoller, 2004). Viewing these reports as a series, one notes a development from case reports and program descriptions to more general research questions, more classroom-based research, and an increasingly international perspective. This article will further develop this international perspective with a specific but not exclusive focus on content-and-language integrated learning (CLIL) research conducted in Europe over the last 5 or 6 years. Evidence for the global interest in CLIL can be gleaned from the numerous activities in this area: the establishment of an Association Internationale de Linguistique Appliquée research network on CLIL and immersion classrooms for the 2006-2011 period (www.ichm.org/clil/), a symposium at American Association of Applied Linguistics conference 2010 organized by Roy Lyster, the recent foundation of an association for CLIL at tertiary level (ICLHE--Integrating Content and Language in Higher Education; www.iclhe.org), a biennial series of CLIL conferences in Europe since 2004 (e.g., www.clilconsortium.jyu.fi/), the foundation of the Latin American Journal of Content & Language Integrated Learning, a new series of conferences in Latin America (www.clilsymposium.org), and many more.
CLIL: CHARACTERISTICS AND CONTRASTS
Widely advertised as a "dual-focused approachâ[euro] that gives equal attention to language and content (e.g., Mehisto, Marsh, & Frigols, 2008, p. 9), CLIL can be described as an educational approach where curricular content is taught through the medium of a foreign language, typically to students participating in some form of mainstream education at the primary, secondary, or tertiary level.
Although the first "Lâ[euro] in CLIL is meant to stand for any language, it would be an extreme case of denial to claim that this is also the case in reality. CLIL languages tend to be recruited from a small group of prestigious languages, and outside the English-speaking countries, the prevalence of English as CLIL medium is overwhelming (see Eurydice Network, 2006; Fernández et al., 2008; Lim & Low, 2009). Therefore, most of the time in this article, CLIL effectively means CEIL, or content-and-English integrated learning.
Without a doubt, there are many characteristics that CLIL shares with other types of bilingual education, such as content-based instruction...