Developing the Concept of Cultural Heritage Through CLIL

Melita Lemut Bajec

Summary:  CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) is an interdisciplinary didactic approach, in which the language is used as a tool to achieve goals of different school subjects. Such approach enables an in-depth overview of a topic, stimulates work on higher-order thinking levels and helps educate critical thinkers. The research conducted among 54 grammar school students aimed to find out whether teaching through CLIL leads to better test results; how students experience the approach and if it can affect the awareness of cultural heritage more than other commonly used pedagogical approaches. Quantitative data was gathered through questionnaires and test results. Qualitative data came from students’ and monitors’ answers. We found out that knowledge is statistically better on Bloom’s middle taxonomic level as well as overall; there are also statistically significant differences in the satisfaction levels in favour of the other commonly used pedagogical approaches, nonetheless, the experimental group expressed a very positive first experience with CLIL. We found out no statistically significant differences between the two approaches on the awareness of cultural heritage. Yet, as numerous qualitative data gave various advantages of CLIL in comparison to the communicative approach it would be useful to think of developing a model that would bring CLIL into grammar schools at least occasionally and thus make the programme richer.