ABSTRACT
Upon debuting as an acronym in the 1990s, Italian foreign language (FL) educators
readily joined their European colleagues in welcoming CLIL as a ‘European solution
to [the] European challenge’ (Marsh 2002) of ensuring that citizens master not one
but two FLs. This enthusiasm was further justified by the hopes that embedding
content subjects within an FLwould provide more authentic contexts for FL-use and
thus FL-learning. However, since Italy began ‘forcing’ CLIL into content classrooms
(e.g. Gazetta 24/12/20111) it is receiving a rather arid reception from content
t, ‘IPSSS L. Da Vinci’, Cosenz , Ita y; bScience Department, Liceo Scientifico ‘Galileo Galilei’, Calabria, Paola, Italy; cThe Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, The University of Calabria, Cosenza, Calabria, Italy
CONTENT AND LANGUAGE INTEGRATED LEARNING
teachers, and their FL colleagues are increasingly more disenchanted: this Decree
mandates that, by the 20132014 academic year, lyceums and technical institutions must implement CLIL in the final year of study, in one non-lingual discipline, during
the content lesson by a content teacher with C1-Level English competence. A science
teacher must, for example, during her already limited 2h/week of science lessons, use
CLIL and her C1-level English to move the science curriculum forward. This raises
several concerns for professionals in both content education and EFL instruction.
