1.2 Language Across the Curriculum

1.2 Language Across the Curriculum

Why Language Demands Matter in CLIL

Every curricular subject makes its own demands on listening, speaking, reading, and writing. A CLIL teacher cannot simply "teach the subject" without first identifying which language forms and vocabulary learners need in order to understand the input and produce their own spoken or written output. This is what the syllabus calls the language demands of the curriculum: the forms, structures, and vocabulary learners must control to understand and communicate about subject content in the target language, across all four skills — listening, speaking, reading, and writing — not only in written work.

Grammatical Forms Learners Need Across Subjects

The Cambridge TKT: CLIL syllabus identifies a specific — and testable — list of grammatical forms that recur across curricular subjects:

• Present, past, and future forms — used constantly to describe processes, historical events, and predictions (e.g. "Water evaporates," "The builders constructed the bridge in 1889," "Sea levels will rise"). The syllabus specifies these forms only at this general level; more fine-grained aspectual detail, such as the present perfect continuous, is not part of this list.
• Comparative and superlative forms — for comparing data, materials, or historical periods (e.g. "Copper is more conductive than plastic," "The Nile is the longest river in Africa").
• Modal verbs — expressing a wide range of meanings that subject content constantly requires: ability, certainty, deduction, obligation, permission, prediction, preference, possibility, probability, prohibition, and speculation (e.g. "Metals can conduct electricity" [ability], "This must be an igneous rock" [deduction], "You must wear goggles" [obligation], "The results might change" [possibility]).
• Conditionals — for hypothesising about cause and effect (e.g. "If the temperature drops below zero, water freezes").
• Passive forms — extremely common in scientific and historical writing, where the focus is on the process or event rather than the agent (e.g. "The bridge was built in 1889," "Energy is transferred from one object to another").
• Imperatives — for instructions, especially in practical and experimental subjects (e.g. "Measure the liquid," "Record your results").
• Questions — for both teacher-to-learner checking and learner-to-learner enquiry (e.g. "What happens if we add heat?").
• Reported speech — for summarising what a source, textbook, or classmate said (e.g. "The scientist reported that temperatures had risen").
• Personal and impersonal pronouns — for tracking who or what is being discussed, including the impersonal "it" common in scientific description (e.g. "It is believed that...").
• Time expressions — for sequencing processes and historical events (e.g. "first," "then," "during the 19th century").
• Connectors — the basic logical links and, but, or, and because that hold subject explanations together.
• Collocations, synonyms, opposites, and specialist subject vocabulary — the lexical layer that lets learners use precise, natural combinations of words (e.g. "carry out an experiment" rather than "do an experiment"), recognise near-equivalent terms, contrast opposing concepts (e.g. "solid" vs "liquid"), and name subject-specific concepts (e.g. "photosynthesis," "tectonic plate," "democracy").

Planning for Language Demands: A Worked Example

Consider a CLIL history lesson on the causes of a conflict. Before teaching the content, the teacher audits the language demands: learners will need past tense forms to narrate what happened, passive forms for statements like "The treaty was signed in 1919," connectors such as "because" and "as a result" to explain causation, modal verbs of deduction and speculation ("This could have caused the tension," "Relations must have been strained"), and specialist vocabulary such as "alliance," "treaty," or "reparations." Having identified these in advance, the teacher can pre-teach the vocabulary, model a sentence frame using the passive ("The ___ was signed by ___"), and provide a connector bank on the board — so that when learners attempt to explain the causes themselves, the language scaffolding is already in place.

A science teacher planning a lesson on states of matter would similarly need to anticipate that learners will use comparative forms ("Gases are less dense than liquids"), modal verbs of probability and certainty ("Ice will definitely melt above 0°C"), imperatives for the practical instructions ("Heat the beaker slowly"), and specialist vocabulary and opposites ("solid" vs "liquid" vs "gas," "melting" vs "freezing"). A maths lesson on measurement makes similar demands: questions ("How much longer is this side?"), comparatives ("This angle is smaller than that one"), and specialist vocabulary ("perimeter," "circumference").

Why This List Is Tested Precisely

Cambridge examiners write matching and multiple-choice items that test whether a candidate can recognise which specific grammatical category a given classroom example belongs to — for instance, distinguishing a modal verb expressing obligation from one expressing deduction, or recognising that the present perfect continuous sits outside what the syllabus specifies. Careful, example-based revision of this list — rather than only memorising the category names — is the most efficient way to prepare for Content Area 1 questions on language demands.