EDUCATION

CLIL – Bilingual Education - TTO: Here to Stay!

By Anne Maljers and Onno van Wilgenburg

The people of the Netherlands are traditionally known for their good command of foreign languages. Some argue that this follows from living in a small country, others point to the direction of the Dutch as an international trade force, cruising the seas in search of economic gain. Probably, there is an element of truth to both. However, the practical attitude of the Dutch towards using languages in order to communicate with people who do not speak Dutch by no means implies that the Dutch do not value their own languages.

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), known in Dutch as ‘tweetalig onderwijs’ (‘TTO’), or bilingual education, is an educational approach in which non-language subjects such as history or biology are taught using a language other than the mother tongue. Over the past the years, CLIL has developed into a specialist school type in secondary education. English is the main target language. There is, to date, only one school that offers Dutch/German CLIL, not surprisingly located near the German border.

Successful Innovation
CLIL in the Netherlands originates from the international education stream. Here, international education is only available to a specific target group, consisting of expats, children of diplomats, etc. International schools are not allowed to accept pupils who do not have an international background. In 1989, one of the international schools decided, upon the demand of the parents, to open a bilingual department for Dutch students, who would follow the regular Dutch curriculum partly in Dutch and partly in English. The initiative of this school (Alberdingk Thijm, Hilversum) led to the successful introduction of CLIL into Dutch secondary schools. Since then, the number of CLIL-schools has grown rapidly from one CLIL school in 1989 to a network of 99 secondary schools in the 2008/2009 school year. Of the approximately 670 secondary schools in the Netherlands, 10% offer CLIL. It is expected that this percentage will rise to 25% in 2010. This bottom-up approach is considered by some to be one of the most successful innovations in Dutch education in the past 20 years.

Safeguarding the Quality
One of the consequences of this bottom-up development is that CLIL in secondary education is not included in educational laws, or in the financing system of the Ministry of Education. The Dutch model for CLIL as a prescribed invariable model does not exist, at least not in terms of specific Ministry of Education-guidelines regarding the content of CLIL, its subjects or timeframe, etc. The official position of the Inspectorate for Education and the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science is that up to half of the total number of lessons may be taught in English, that the Dutch curriculum must be followed, and that CLIL cannot be financially elitist. Naturally, the students’ competencies in Dutch cannot be negatively affected by CLIL. In order to safeguard the quality of CLIL, a ‘standard’ was developed by the schools themselves, supervised and coordinated by the Europees Platform (European Platform).
CLIL has two main overall aims: for the students to develop a better command of the CLIL language, and a preparation for and orientation towards a more international society. The CLIL curriculum mirrors both aims through a language provision in the subjects, a strong international component in the lessons as well as through various internationally-oriented activities.

Command of Dutch Language
As the CLIL schools actually follow the Dutch curriculum, not all expat children will benefit from the richness it offers. The network schools have different policies and support strategies for children who do not have a Dutch-language background, but in general, this type of school will presumably not be the best bilingual place for a pupil whose Dutch is not of a certain level. However, if a pupil already has a good command of the Dutch language, and will not be leaving the Netherlands before finishing secondary school, a CLIL school can be a good alternative.
The school fees are considerably lower than those of international schools and vary between € 300-500 per student per school year.
Future Developments
It is expected that the number of secondary CLIL schools will stabilise at a certain point in time. This does not, however, imply that the growth of the number of CLIL students will stop. Experienced schools are now looking into the possibilities of using their expertise towards the expansion of the CLIL-options within their school. Thus also students from the HAVO or VMBO (the five-year and four-year high school programmes, respectively) will be offered access to the benefits of CLIL. Also, whereas now English is the main target language for CLIL, the positive outcome of the CLIL-methodology is likely to impact other modern languages. In this, teacher competence remains a central issue.
New challenges are thus mainly to be sought in introducing other languages into CLIL and offering CLIL to other students. The vocational sector potentially is a growth sector, as it is argued that these students could perhaps benefit from CLIL-methodology the most.
In the secondary schools’ remit, CLIL has found a firm place and is here to stay!

For more information visit: www.europeesplatform.nl