Abstract:

Being able to communicate in foreign languages has become an increasingly important part of our everyday life. In an era of globalization and trends of international economic cooperation and integration, rapid exchange of ideas and information and labour mobility, foreign language skills are among the important prerequisites for competitive environment of the 21st century’s global market. Nowadays employers don't only look for academic qualifications in potential employees, but also generic skills important for the job. Apart from other generic skills important for employability, knowledge of a foreign language (English in particular) is considered as a highly valued competence. Along with the development of a knowledge-based economy, higher education institutions are faced with the challenge of creating curricula that will adequately prepare students for the world of work. Higher education in Croatia has offered for many years LSP (Language for Specific Purposes) courses for students focusing on the language in terms of syntax, lexis, discourse, semantics, etc. in the context of a specific field. LSP promotes learning the language in chosen field of specialization. CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), on the other hand, is an educational approach focusing more on content-learning objectives than language-learning objectives.

The main goal of integrating CLIL is to accomplish proficiency in both, by teaching the content not in, but through foreign language – the language is just a means and not a goal.

The purpose of this paper is to present the attitudes among students of civil engineering and architecture towards integrating CLIL at the Faculty of Civil Engineering Osijek (Croatia). The questionnaire, especially designed for the purpose of this study, was given to three different groups of students regarding the year of study and courses taught partly in English (just a few lectures within particular course). The authors analysed whether there were any differences in attitudes among them and additionally were there any significant differences regarding gender and prior content and English knowledge.

Keywords:

Content and language integrated learning (CLIL), attitudes, tertiary level of education, engineering students.