Defamiliarising Input Presentation Strategies in CLIL. What do Students Think?

CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) is an approach which has already been widely developed throughout Europe; in Italy, a law (Legge Moratti, 53/2003; D.L. 17.10.2010 n. 226) requires its adoption during the final year of Liceo, Istituto Tecnico non professionale and from the third year of the Liceo Linguistico. Despite that fact that even in most European countries CLIL is carried out by content teachers, the supporting and collaborative role of the language teacher is still much needed if this approach, which calls for a balance between content and language objectives, is to be exploited in the best way possible. For the above-mentioned reasons language learning risks becoming of secondary importance with respect to content learning, given that content teachers tend, because of their education, to give a prevalent role to the teaching of the subject matter (Dafouz Milne, 2011). It is very likely that the CLIL approach adopted by content teachers will be mainly based only on one type of language learning, the so-called incidental learning, which derives mainly from the teacher’s input (Pavesi, 2002). Precisely for this reason the input must be particularly well prepared, and in this sense, language teachers can play a supporting role for the content teachers, guiding them towards an awareness of the importance of this support. The input, that is, the language the learners are exposed to, is thus a crucial aspect in CLIL, as it is in all processes of teaching-learning (Krashen, 1985). The paper analyses new strategies (henceforth called defamiliarising) are: the use of humour, the use of anecdotes, focusing on form (regarding grammar, lexis and pronunciation) and codeswitching. They have been defined as defamiliarising input presentation strategies because, from the lesson observations, it seemed they were adopted during moments of focus and greater attention on the part of the students. These input strategies, could be particularly useful for emphasising conceptual and linguistic aspects and maintaining in equilibrium that continual balance of stance between teacher and student typical of school contexts.