抄録
CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) is a way of teaching and learning subjects in a language other than learners’ mother tongue. It originated in Europe in mid 1990s as a measure to rectify inefficient foreign language education. Supported by the EU’s linguistic and cultural policy, CLIL has spread very fast throughout Europe. Today many countries in the world are trying to implement CLIL, especially English CLIL, into their education, from primary to tertiary, recognising its great potentials for fostering a high-level proficiency of English, a most powerful global language. Japan is following suit. It is a little annoying, however, to see language programmes or lessons labeled as "CLIL" simply because some kind of content, not necessarily subject content, is dealt with in their teaching. If CLIL continues to be an educational fashion, it may be thrown away and forgotten before its real potentials are fully realised. To avoid such an unhappy scenario, this paper focuses on CLIL in Finland, one of the European countries where CLIL has been enthusiastically pursued, and tries to examine how CLIL is understood and conducted at school, hoping for a sustainable development of CLIL as an innovative but promising approach in Japan.
