The Specific purpose of English for CLIL: the students’ perspective

EU internationalization policies have had a great impact on Italian mainstream educational curricula and have given impetus to the spread of Content and Language Integrated Learning (henceforth CLIL), a dual-focused approach which shares a number of key features with English for Specific Purposes (henceforth ESP), such as the use of content from different non-linguistic subjects and the development of academic and communication skills, and with general English courses, such as communicative language teaching methodology. In view of the fact that students are the beneficiaries of content and language curriculum requirements, the aim of this study is to give voice to their perspective. It is the authors’ experience that students have mostly been asked about their level of appreciation of CLIL, but this study intends to explore how and if they are coping with the demands of bilingual instruction. Our findings are derived from three separate questionnaires administered to students, English as Foreign Language (henceforth EFL) teachers and CLIL subject teachers from twenty Italian upper secondary schools of the Campania Region situated in southern Italy. The survey results are intended to attain the twofold aim of identifying the specific purpose of English for CLIL and exploring the impact on students’ learning practices.