Communication as a Teaching/Learning Strategy in Bilingual Education

Abstract

This paper is based on my experience as a member of the coordinating team of the Plurilingual Education Programme (PEP) at the School of Education, Universidad de Cadiz (Spain). We have been working with a group of 23 subject-matter teachers belonging to up to 13 content areas and three target languages: English, French and German. The main purpose of the project was to train lectures on the CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) methodological approach. We have focused our training on content and communication (based on Coyle (1999)’s four C’s framework) with an emphasis on constructing the communicative channels appropriate to convey content with language as a medium of communication, not as an aim itself. As communicative exchanges will be between non-native teachers and non-native students, teachers have been trained on some communicative strategies typical of the CLIL approach in order to improve the teachers’ communicative competence. In this paper, some of these strategies and their benefits will be depicted : using the foreign language as the language of communication in the class, improving clarity of speech, enhancing oral interaction with/among students, visual aids, rephrasing, reformulating, redundancy or content reduction are amongst the most essential strategies to improve communicative exchanges in bilingual settings.