Preparing for CLIL in Southern Italy and beyond: CLIL Teacher Training

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is growing in importance in Italy, especial- ly since the Italian Education Ministry made it obligatory in most secondary schools (MIUR: 2010c). However, the road to a fully working system is long and winding. It has been noted that one important aspect on the road to reaching the goal of an implemented CLIL system in schools is that of teacher training (Coyle et al. 2010; Di Martino and Di Sabato 2012; Muñoa Barredo 2011; Alcaraz-Mármol 2018). This article refers to the training of secondary school teachers in a CLIL methodology course at a university in the south of Italy. This paper reflects upon issues involved in preparing these teachers and their feelings about their preparation. To do this it is first necessary to identify the current situation of CLIL in Italian secondary schools and see what a teacher training programme can do to prepare these content teachers for their new future role. Further fuel for these reflections comes from the answers that a group of such teachers gave to the questions presented in a written questionnaire about their motivation and their concerns. The paper ends with some conclusions drawn from this experience. Work like this is necessary because CLIL is not the same across Europe, as the different cultural aspects produce a variety of contexts for CLIL to operate in and, therefore, a variety of CLILs (Coyle and Meyer 2021). It is hoped that reflections from one context can feed into and help the experiences of another context. The paper suggests that having limited resources and support does hinder the work that we can do but that Italy has made a start to improve the situation.