It's demonstrated that very young children have an enormous capacity to learn new languages. The earlier you start teaching them, the more they will dominate the foraign language. These language learning skills disappear over the years and that's the reason why it's our commitment, as teachers, to take profit of them. CLIL is the perfect tool for doing it. As Do Coyle says in his article "Developing CLIL: Towards a theory of practice", this system has the capacity to integrate varied, dynamic and innovative learning environments, so important nowadays.
CLIL promotes language as a medium for learning any subject (mathematics, art, history,...), so its purpose is that kids learn the foreign language but also learn new content. Both are equally important. Moreover, and as the article's writer affirms, CLIL also has the following benefits for children:
-Raise learner linguistic competence and confidence
-Raise teacher and learner expectations
-Increasing vocabulary learning skills and grammatical awareness
-Motivate and encourage student independence
-Encourage linguistic spontaneity if students are enabled to learn through the language rather than in the language
-Develop study skills, concentration, learning how to learn
-Generate positive attitudes
For all of this, I personally think that CLIL is a great and helpful tool to be used in Preschool, when children are really susceptible to learn. Learning content through a foreign language will give them strong skills to be used during the Primary Education years.
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