Teachers’ Perceptions and Needs of CLIL: A Collective Case Study from Turkey

Abstract

Since the 1990s, CLIL has become a popular and well-established educational approach in English Language and Teaching (ELT) and has been cited for its positive learning outcomes. CLIL’s rising popularity in ELT is predicated on the necessity of internationalisation and unprecedented population mobility (Nikula, Dalton-Puffer and Llinares, 2013). Another reason why CLIL has attracted scholarly attention is attributed to CLIL’s pedagogical practicality. As Coyle (2006) suggests, CLIL can offer “opportunities involving problem-solving, risk-taking, confidence building, communication skills, extending vocabulary, self-expression and spontaneous talk” (p. 7) because it fuses content and language learning with a dual-approach. Such being the case, the aim of this collective case study was to investigate 5 in-service high school EFL teachers’ perceptions about and needs of CLIL. In line with this goal, relevant data were collected through 1) reflective essays written by the participants after reading the article about CLIL, which was distributed to them for raising awareness purposes, 2) semi-structured interviews with them after these lessons. This was a purely qualitative study with the aims of gaining an in-depth insight into the topic at hand from the teachers’ points of view and creating a venue for their voices to be heard. Data garnered from these tools were carefully scrutinized, and the pattern coding generated three main themes regarding the research questions, namely CLIL’s benefits and challenges and teachers’ needs.