WHY+IS+CLIL+BETTER?

Alfredo's POV (from past experience, reading of contents from this wiki, course experience plus reflection).

Despite CLIL goes into with a new topic taken from the subject, a first answer has to do with a different grasp of previous-basic, perhaps misunderstood L1 concepts, that is provoked by the L2 learning approach. A similar explanation has been described as “familiarity effect”. When you have to make up a system of scientific concepts in L1, you pick up meanings of every single concept in a wide and spontaneous sense, i.e. from everyday life. The system you create in this way may result unsatisfactory as a whole for your needs or, if you don’t care, it can be inadequate for communicating with experts (teachers) within real contexts (as in knowledge assessing). Scientific terms in L2 have different relationships with ordinary language and with subject’s meanings. So the CLIL teacher gives the student a different-new opportunity to re-discover the system, often in a simpler structure, and to filter out meanings in L1 that are more suitable to the context. All this makes up a better focusing and sensing out of the whole system, as stereoscopic vision is better than single eyed vision. In a wider sense, the first answer is a particular case of the “lesson delusion” effect. Teachers and students applying transmissive methodologies believe that understanding and learning can be achieved by attending thoroughly to masterly lessons. In constructive methodologies we know how to avoid this kind of delusion. Also the reduced acquaintance with second language of both teacher and students drives the students towards an enhanced exploiting of their inner understanding resources, making them less depending on the teacher's speech. This perspective claims that the same kind of improvement in learning quality could be yielded by renouncing to long speeches of tradictional classes by substituting them with thinking-activities, as problem solving (in L1). A similar remark can be made to the “learning by doing” methodology, because it suggests pre-structured plans of activities and communicative-collaborative games that lead to an overload of working memory just to grasp the sub-tasks, thus leaving a little or no resources to reflect and discuss about ideas, principles, concepts that should be organized in the aims of the activity. In that case true understanding is invalidated and only shall ow knowledge expectations can be satisfied. Learning by doing doesn't pass through understanding by subjective discovering, that is open ended and time consuming, but also distinctive of true constructivist approaches aimed to deep understanding. The latter is usually necessary for experimental sciences as chemistry or physics, and eventually unnecessary for declarative learning of biology and natural sciences and rote mathematics learning. I had three CLIL classes in September in the fourth grade group. The outcome was very good and the students understood that "CLIL is better", for a better understanding of organic chemistry, as a primary appreciation. They accepted soon these classes and were very satisfied, declaring this is due mainly to the slowing down of lesson-rhythm and to a sort of simplification of the content. This is partially true, but it isn't not the only reason, in my opinion. Next classes need to improve and diversify the kind of active participation of the students.
 * Why can teaching of chemistry principles be more effective in L2-CLIL than in L1?**