Quality interfaces: examining evidence & exploring solutions in CLIL

AuszugThe Catholic University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt was so pleased to host the “CLIL 2010 Conference: In Pursuit of Excellence”. In retrospect, it kept its promise: the opportunity for all participants to see best CLIL practice and research, the best that it has had to offer, past and present. Therefore I would like to say thank you first of all to those who had initiated, planned and literally given their souls for the conference: David Marsh and Oliver Meyer, had put together a brilliant and exciting conference program with an incredible amount of work, outstanding expertise and true CLIL experts. Their efforts taken made a big step forward possible, and achieved an important milestone, towards more quality in European language education environments in general and especially in CLIL development. Authentic learning and teaching settings, meaningful contents and challenging tasks for our younger and older language learners as an average quality precondition are becoming within reach. As we move forward, David Marsh and Oliver Meyer are setting a path to facilitate the dialogue between teachers, researchers and teacher trainers on all educational levels, and to enable their networking. Such a network can also ensure that through quality CLIL settings younger and older learners get a sufficient amount of exposure to the English language, which naturally must be intensely consistent, continuous and rich. Latest research findings indicate that for a learner of a language different from his or her mother tongue, an exposure of about thirty percent of his or her waking hours is sufficient to acquire the new language. CLIL in an institutionalized learning surrounding such as kindergarten, preschool facilities or schools would meet these prerequisites. And once a bilingual or even partially bilingual setting is provided, learning additional languages would be facilitated, as newest brain research testifies. These recent neurodidactical studies are also about to prove the hypothesis that though monolingual and bilingual processing brains work mainly in the same area, bilingual education engages more language processing regions than are normally available. That`s good news – and also an obligation for curricula developers on all educational levels to implement and integrate learning at least in two languages – in order to follow the road towards a multilingual, interculturally competent society. These conference proceedings give an ideal and exemplary overview of the CLIL quality status quo, and represent a conference to remember in this respect and in many other ways. Eichstaett, March 2012 Heiner Böttger