ABSTRACT
Importantly, this aim of gaining confidence is linked, like the difference
constructed between CLIL and EFL, to the international aspect of engineers’
working lives, where the dominant role of English is taken for granted. One content
teacher’s statement can be seen as summarising this view of CLIL: ‘a vocational
school trains for the job and with all this globalisation it is actually unthinkable to
manage without English’. In this context, English is also usually viewed as English as
a Lingua Franca, and its importance as a means of communication internationally
with speakers of diverse L1s highlighted. The importance of English is seen as self-
evident, or as one content teacher put it: ‘even the stupidest person understands that
he needs languages or that languages are important and so nobody asks ‘‘why do we
need this [CLIL]?’’’. Interestingly, this need for international expertise and language
proficiency is implicitly linked only to CLIL and not seen as the domain of the
subject English. To some extent this might be explained by the construction of CLIL
as closer to ‘real life’ than English, or as one student put it ‘the technical stuff is one
thing, where you do technology in English, and the other thing is the English lessons
where you talk about your hobbies’. This ‘division of labour’ between CLIL and
EFL classes has interesting parallels with an observation made above, namely
the different construction of English as ‘native language (ENL)’ on the part of the
English teachers versus its construction as international lingua franca (ELF) on the
part of the technology teachers.
