Abstract:

The fact that Foreign Language learning also takes place indirectly while communicating content has been generally acknowledged and was both the starting point and the main goal of those who developed the CLIL practice (the acronym for Content and Language Integrated Learning) in a classroom. Although the CLIL method is believed to have the dual-focused aim to learn a foreign language and, simultaneously, a content, the fact that the learning of a non-language subject may even be facilitated if taught in a foreign language has not been studied so far and it is not a straightforward matter.
The latter topic is the objective of an Italian experimental project on CLIL practice in secondary schools since, in our opinion, its results will strongly affect the decision of the schools on whether to start a CLIL practice or to follow a standard curriculum.
Notably, the project, which follows on from a previous European project, aims at investigating the advantages of learning Mathematics in a CLIL classroom. One of the project hypotheses is that the foreign language (namely, English) employed to teach mathematics displays features that might help symbolic and schematic representations, being more “controlled” and structurally “simpler” than the native language. Some data of the previous European project have been analysed as a pilot study for the new experimental project.

Keywords:

CLIL, Foreign Language Learning, teaching methodology.