Abstract:

This paper reports on a recent COIL (Collaborative Online International Learning) programme, developed within the frame of an international online cooperation between two universities: the University of Education Karlsruhe (Germany) and Deakin University (Melbourne, Australia). The COIL programme’s aim was to connect pre-service teachers of languages enrolled in Bachelor (Karlsruhe) and Master of Teaching (Deakin) courses through collaborative online learning activities that focused on the theory, pedagogy and practice of CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning).

Our COIL programme engaged a multilingual approach at two levels:
1) Discipline content focused on multilingual CLIL didactics and its application in linguistically diverse classrooms;
2) The COIL activities used multilingual teaching, learning and research methods. In this paper, we discuss the methodologies we engaged for our COIL programme, and select multilingual methods we designed and used for supporting our students’ learning about multilingual CLIL.

Specifically, we provide an overview of the different online learning platforms used and the online learning tasks which we designed. Further, we reflect on our experiences with the implementation of our multilingual CLIL-COIL programme and its contribution to our respective institutional agendas and priorities for the internationalisation of teacher education and the teaching profession, and the internationalisation of higher education more broadly.

As we are keen to expand our currently bilateral cooperation into a wider network, we encourage the participation of new cooperation partners in our multilingual CLIL-COIL.

Keywords:

COIL, CLIL, online learning platforms, multilingualism, internationalisation, higher education, teacher education, internationalising curriculum.