Welcome

Dear readers,

This first post is written to inform about the idea underlying this blog. Thus, tree aspects have to be considered: firstly the content of the entries, secondly the purpose of those entries and linked to the latter, finally, the definition and purpose of CLIL.

The entries in this blog deal with various topics of the political sphere. It is, however, not designed to inform about the political or social matters proper, but to express personal views on political and social issues.

Offering students of various forms a platform to post essays, comments or reports on different political issues and thereby uttering their personal views, this blog is also a contribution to CLIL.

The acronym CLIL can be understood as “Content and Language Integrated Learning, and is where a subject [i.e. social studies] is taught in the target language rather than the first language of the learners. In CLIL classes, tasks are designed to allow students to focus on and learn to use the new language as they learn the new subject content” (http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/knowledge-database/clil, last opened: 23/04/2014). By learning the new subject content, additionally, the students gain insight into the (political) culture of the country analysed.

Learning about the (political) culture of the countries considered, the students also acquire the values which the specific nations are based on. Those different values themselves can gradually become the basis on which students will form their own opinions. This seems to be especially important as far as controversial topics are concerned. An approach to establish controversy is to regard and then evaluate various points of views on the same topic but in different countries. As this demand of social studies by regarding a topic from various perspectives is inherent in CLIL itself, it can rather easily be generated by bilingual teaching as such.

To sum up the blog is a way of communicating and presenting students' opinions based on a certain set of values formed by CLIL not only in class but also to wider audience. Incidentally, it opens an insight to relatively new field of CLIL in terms of social studies.

G. B.