Key pedagogical principles for effective CLIL instruction/Multilingual Past – Monolingual Future? (MEITS seminar series)

Key pedagogical principles for effective CLIL instruction in multilingual primary education settings

Dieuwerke (Dee) Rutgers, University of Cambridge

In response to growing internationalisation, the number of primary schools in Europe offering early foreign language programmes has risen sharply in recent years. Increasingly, these schools are adopting a content-and-language-integrated (CLIL) approach to the teaching of foreign languages, thereby placing new demands on primary school teachers associated with the integration of content and language didactics. At the same time, the forces of globalisation behind the increased levels of internationalisation in education have also contributed to changing patterns of migration, and an increase in the linguistic diversity of classrooms. Because of both these changes, primary school teachers are increasingly teaching – or are expected to teach – subject content to pupils whose mother tongues differ from the language of instruction, whether in CLIL programmes or in mainstream education. This requires an increased awareness and understanding of the language demands of the curricula that they are implementing, as well as a new didactic repertoire that responds to the linguistic needs of additional language learners while maintaining high academic standards. This presentation will discuss the finding associated with a small-scale exploratory research project conducted in the Netherlands, which seeks to strengthen content didactics through a focus on language and to identify the pedagogical principles and didactic repertoires underlying effective CLIL instruction across a range of multilingual primary settings. 

Multilingual Past – Monolingual Future? Language and National ‘Imagination’ in Ukraine since the Euromaidan Revolution

Ivan Kozachenko, University of Cambridge

The victory of the Euromaidan revolution in Ukraine over the regime of Victor Yanukovych was followed by the occupation and annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and active support of the armed insurgency in Donbas by the Russian Federation. These dramatic events were, and continue to be, fuelled by competing visions of Ukraine’s history, identity, and its place in the world. Ukrainian statehood is threatened not only by Russian military aggression, but also by the large-scale propaganda campaign based on neo-imperial Russian discourses. In Ukraine itself the national project remains the topic of heated public debates. Here the status of the Russian language, as well as the way in which Ukrainian is supported and popularised, remain highly divisive. The aggression has revived the idiomatic expression ‘occupier’s language’ in describing Russian, which has now taken on a new and more literal meaning, making consensus and the accommodation of cultural and linguistic diversity even more challenging than before.

The proposed project addresses the role of languages in the Ukrainian national ‘imagination’ (Anderson, 1983) by studying the interplay between popular social media discourses and ‘narration’ (Bhabha, 1990) of the Ukrainian national project by writers, poets and intellectuals. It seeks to explain why particular ideas and narratives regarding languages become important and obtain transformative power. This presentation will provide an overview of the theoretical and methodological frameworks developed for this study.