Biodata

Phil Ball works mainly for the Federation of Basque Schools, based in San Sebastián in Spain. He is a CLIL materials writer and teacher-trainer and was closely involved with the award-winning Basque project, ‘Eleanitz’.  He has been involved in several European-based CLIL projects, and has written a wide variety of CLIL-based textbooks for the Basque and Spanish socialscience and English language programmes. He co-designed the new ‘CLIL Essentials’ online course for the British Council and works as a consultant for NILE in England.

He is the co-author of the recent book about CLIL, ‘Putting CLIL into Practice’ (Oxford University Press 2015) and the CLIL textbook series for the Basque compentence-based curriculum (EKI), for which he is the author, was nominated for the ELTONS Innovation Award in London, in 2016.

The 3 Dimensions of Content

What is ‘content’, and what is ‘language’?  Neither subject nor language teachers would have any problem answering this question with regard to conventional teaching through the mother-tongue, but in CLIL the considerations change.  Subject teachers need support in identifying the key language in their learning sequences, so that they can then make it more salient, and language teachers – now showing more interest in what CLIL can do for them – need to consider the nature of ‘content’ – namely what it is, how it behaves, and how it can be supported methodologically.

This talk will illustrate the notion of the three dimensions of content in CLIL, namely conceptual, procedural and linguistic. This framework helps subject and language teachers to work together in bilingual learning contexts by enabling them to better understand the classroom demands that their colleagues face.