2.1 Planning a CLIL Lesson or Series of Lessons

What CLIL Lesson Planning Adds to Ordinary Lesson Planning

CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) is an approach in which a curriculum subject -- geography, science, history, art, physical education -- is taught through an additional language, and that additional language develops through genuine use in the subject. A CLIL teacher plans two linked outcomes in a single lesson: what learners will know and do in the subject, and what language they will need in order to get there. Because both outcomes are moving at once, TKT: CLIL groups the planning skills a CLIL teacher needs into a specific set of elements that go beyond a standard subject lesson plan: teaching objectives, learning outcomes, activating prior knowledge, tasks designed to develop the 4 Cs, differentiation, support strategies, learner interaction patterns, resources, Can Do statements, and links to other curricular subjects.

Imagine a secondary science teacher in a bilingual programme who is about to teach a unit on the water cycle in English to 13-year-olds whose first language is not English. A subject-only plan would list the content aims (evaporation, condensation, precipitation, collection) and move straight to a diagram. A CLIL plan for the same lesson has to decide, in addition, which words and sentence patterns the class needs in order to talk and write about that content, how much English support is realistic for this group, and how the lesson connects to what learners already know from a geography class taught in their first language. Planning at this level is what distinguishes a CLIL lesson from a language lesson that happens to mention a topic, and from a subject lesson that ignores the language load the topic places on learners.

The ten planning elements above are not a checklist to complete in order. A strong CLIL plan interweaves them: the learning outcome decides what counts as success, the prior-knowledge stage decides where the lesson can safely start, and the differentiation and support decisions decide how every learner, not just the strongest, can reach that outcome.

Teaching Objectives, Learning Outcomes and Activating Prior Knowledge

A teaching objective states what the teacher intends to teach: for example, 'to teach the stages of the water cycle using the target vocabulary evaporation, condensation, precipitation and collection.' A learning outcome states what the learner will be able to do as a result, and it must be checkable by the end of the lesson: for example, 'learners will be able to label a diagram of the water cycle and describe each stage in a full sentence using at least two target verbs.' Objectives describe teaching intent; outcomes describe learner performance. A CLIL plan needs both, because a subject teacher working through a second language needs a concrete way to check whether the content was learned, the language was used accurately, or both.

Before new content is presented, CLIL planning builds in a stage for activating prior knowledge -- drawing out what learners already know about the topic, in their first language, their additional language, or both. This might be a KWL grid (What I Know, What I want to know, What I Learned), a quick brainstorm of associated words, or a true/false prediction task. For a lesson on volcanoes, a teacher might show a photograph and elicit any words learners associate with it before introducing subject-specific terms such as magma, crater and eruption.

Activating prior knowledge matters twice in CLIL: it surfaces existing content knowledge, and it surfaces existing language learners can already recruit, so class time is not spent re-teaching words or structures the group already controls.

The 4 Cs, Differentiation, Interaction and the Rest of the Plan

CLIL tasks are planned to develop content, communicative skills and cognitive skills, with a consistent focus on culture -- the combination the TKT: CLIL syllabus describes as tasks designed to develop the 4 Cs. A single task, well designed, moves more than one of these forward together: asking learners to compare rainfall patterns in their own region with a region studied in the lesson develops content knowledge, gives a real reason to communicate a comparison, requires the cognitive skill of comparing and contrasting, and opens a cultural dimension by connecting the subject to learners' own context.

Differentiation means planning different routes to the same or an adjusted outcome for learners at different levels -- for example, giving a partially completed diagram to learners who need more support and a blank diagram to learners who do not. Support strategies are the scaffolds a teacher adds during the lesson itself: sentence starters, word banks, visuals, gesture, or paired talk before writing. Learner interaction patterns describe how learners are grouped for a task -- whole-class, pair, small-group or individual work -- and the pattern is chosen to match the task's cognitive and communicative demands, not chosen at random.

Resources are the materials and tools the lesson draws on, from a textbook diagram to a short video. Can Do statements describe what a learner at a given proficiency level can typically achieve in the language (for example, 'can describe a simple process in a few connected sentences'), and they help a CLIL teacher set a learning outcome that is realistic for the group's language level rather than only for their age or subject level. Finally, CLIL planning looks for links to other curricular subjects -- the water cycle connects to geography's climate topics and to mathematics through rainfall data -- because those links let learners transfer both content and language across classes rather than treating each subject as sealed off.

A complete plan for the water cycle lesson would state the objective and outcome, open with a prior-knowledge elicitation, include a 4 Cs task such as a group diagram-and-describe activity, differentiate the diagram support, name the target Can Do statement, and note the link to geography.