ORGANIZATION OF CLIL OR BILINGUAL PROGRAMMES IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS 67

almost all of them have never organized nor taught CLIL courses. The situation is different when it comes to teaching children. Some of them have been teaching CLIL, especially in recent years. Just a very small percentage of them have been teaching English for more than 10 years.

Regarding the subjects taught, Science seems to be very popular, followed by Mathematics and Geography. Even though the other subjects are less frequent, the range of subjects taught is quite large and includes Art, Music, Sport, Citizenship.

In the notes that the teachers added, under the category Other, it is interesting what a teacher said about using CLIL units of the course book. In very recent years CLIL pages have been included in many course books and it could be hypothesized that other teachers could have used course books pages to expand CLIL lessons. Regarding storytelling, workshops on storytelling and CLIL (using stories as a starting point for CLIL projects) have been recently organized and included in a Giunti Conference on reading. In addition, the past in Liguria a work/study group on Educating to tolerance and diversity through storybooks was organized.

That might explain why a considerable number of teachers indicated Citizenship as a CLIL subject.

Regarding the students' age and the class attended, the tendency is to start teaching CLIL from the level of 8 years upwards. Just in a few cases, they start with 7 or 6 year old children. It has to be noted that in Italy teaching English is compulsory from the 1° grade (6 year old children) but just for 1h a week; 2hrs. in the 2° grade; 3 hrs. in the 3°, 4° and 5° grade. Since the hours devoted to English are not many in the 1° and 2° grade and children need to learn the very basic structures of the language, it seems natural that the majority of teachers prefer to start when children are a little older.

Two teachers declare to use CLIL in pre-primary school. In Italy in pre-primary school English activities are suggested, even though are not yet compulsory. Qualified pre-primary teachers are very few and in certain cases the teachers who teach English are the primary school teachers.

When it comes to the CLIL hours spent on a weekly basis, the picture that comes out is not too good. Just 8 teachers replied to this questions: 2 teachers indicated 3 hrs. weekly; 2 teachers indicated 1 hour weekly. Regarding the teachers' comments (Other) , a teacher wrote that the teaching was occasional and another one commented that it depended on the class and on the activity. These reasons are indicated just by a few teachers. Others could have not answered but could have shared the same idea. In addition, it needs to be noted that primary teaching is very often characterized, especially with young children, by flexibility. Apart from other possible reasons, the general picture that comes out from the data is that CLIL doesn't seem to take an important role and space in teaching.

It's not a surprise that, in the context above described, the most popular way of teaching CLIL is individually. In addition, due to economic cuts that affected school personnel as well, teachers have less and less opportunities to work in tandem.

2.1.4 CLIL ACTIVITIES IN YOUR CLASSROOM

A high percentage of teachers have declared to have used authentic materials and to have had the need to adapt the contents. A small number of teachers never used authentic materials, nor adapted them. Probably this could be related to the subject taught. Another reason could be that other teachers used CLIL sessions of the course books or CLIL books for children and CLIL resource books for teachers.

Communicative activities seem to be quite popular, along with T.P.R. activities. Both approaches have been included in teacher training courses for a long time. Less popular seems to be the task based learning, even though it is very often cited by CLIL scholars and it has been used in pilot projects and experimentations.

Cooperative learning is definitely the most used approach, followed by action oriented learning. Scaffolding is used but not to often, while independent learning seems to be used at a minimum level.

The major benefits of CLIL experiences seem to go in a double direction: children's positive attitudes and children's improvement of language competence. Many studies and scholars have pointed out the important role of motivation in the learning process. When children are motivated, they have a positive attitude towards learning and this has a positive effect on the learning process itself.

From the data, also teachers seem to have some benefits in terms of language improvement.

Last but not least, CLIL is also linked to an enrichment of classroom materials and resource.

The benefits seem to remain within the classroom walls: parents and administration do not matter too much. It has to be noted that, since we have seen that CLIL teaching is quite occasional and limited, it is more difficult to have an impact on parents and administration.

One significant critical aspect is the lack of teacher's language competence. This information, combined with the one of the previous section on the positive aspects of CLIL (Teacher's improvement of language competence) could suggest that one way of improving the teacher's language competence is keep going on using CLIL, especially when this is associated with the use of authentic materials and resources.

Another critical aspect mentioned is the inflexible school schedule. This is certainly an important element to be examined in detail, to find out what specific aspects of the school schedule are really inflexible, what aspects could be modified, what the solutions could be. In order to do that the involvement of all the school actors (teachers, headteacher, parents, administration) is essential, especially for longer and bigger CLIL projects. This is a point underlined by many organizers of pilot project in Italy.