Abstract:

Winner of the Nobel Prize, Amartya Sen in his book Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny states that the “decolonization of the mind demands a firm departure from the temptation of solitary identities and priorities”. In education, Amartya Sen´s claim can be met with CLIL didactics. In CLIL cultural concepts are deconstructed through different concepts of the target language. Thus, negotiating the meaning of different concepts, students can reflect on their own concept and reconstruct a new concept, having encountered the Other. According to Cummins, speakers of a mother tongue which differ from the official school language should have advantages in a CLIL class. However, even in some countries in Europe, a unit based on variety, bilingual programmes in reality are not widely established and minority or heritage languages are not integrated into the curriculum. This may lead to barriers of learning for learners with migration backgrounds as their languages are not appreciated in class or at school. This psychosocial factor may cause semilingualism as the learners may refuse to speak their mother tongue. According to Cummins, however, the development of the mother tongue is essential for further linguistic progression as there is a common underlying proficiency which is transferred from one language to the other. Bilingual or multilingual learners can develop their mother tongue in a setting where they can transfer their competences from one language to the other. These learners have good linguistic starting conditions in a CLIL classroom. However, CLIL is often seen as an elite education. For example, bilingual tracks were first offered in grammar schools in Germany and there are still only very few CLIL programmes established explicitly at schools with a high rate of students with a migration background. “The decoloniziation of the mind” might be even taken further, establishing CLIL programmes, integrating heritage languages and not only focusing on prestige or global languages. In such a learning environment bilingual games (Doris Sommer) could set up a tolerant space for discourse, where cultural differences are not suppressed but negotiated.

Keywords:

CLIL, peace, irenic, global, bilingual, heritage languages.