CLIL: The potential of multilingual education

CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) is an educational approach to language learning promoted by the EU Commission to develop multilingual European citizens. The approach has rapidly spread in different forms throughout Europe, mainly as a teacher-led phenomenon. The CLIL approach is also being introduced into Higher Education to meet the needs of rapid internationalisation in European universities. This article provides a brief overview of how CLIL is being implemented, and discusses some of the issues that are currently the subject of debate, focussing mainly on the questions surrounding the CLIL teacher. It concludes with a description of a project for CLIL teacher qualification being developed at the University of Venice