ABSTRACT

Framed within the so-called ‘multilingual turn’ that teachers, teacher educators and researchers are experiencing in our increasingly globalized and migratory world, the chapter first traces the evolution of the principles underpinning Content-Based Instruction (CBI), also named Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) in Europe, this being an approach that has the same essential properties as CBI. Next, it surveys the main research styles and findings of empirical studies that have explored the bilingual procedures used by secondary and high school teachers in educational settings that adopt a content-based language teaching approach. Third, it reports on a classroom-based observational case study undertaken during the teaching of a CLIL biology module in a high school in Italy. The final section draws some conclusions on the functions fulfilled by different forms of translation and translanguaging in the CBI and the CLIL classroom. It also points to future developments in the theory, research, and practice of content-based instruction.