ICLHE/ CLIL at the Tertiary Level of Education. State-of-the-Art

Abstract

This article represents the introduction to a doctoral thesis in Education (Open University, UK) based on CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) at the tertiary level of education. In this sense CLIL can also be called ICLHE (Integrating Content and Language in Higher Education). Such acronyms underscore the importance of both language and content in the teaching-learning process. In the past, research on CLIL focused primarily on the primary and secondary school levels and did not give much consideration to the tertiary level. Moreover, there are great differences between countries in the English-taught programmes at the university level; these differences depend in part on the policies of the individual university. It is for this reason that an analysis of the state-of-the-art is important as a starting point for the present research, in part because Internationalisation projects are in continuous expansion all over Europe.