Planning and Preparing CLIL Materials
Deciding what to use and how to adapt
Materials in CLIL must satisfy two sets of criteria at once: content criteria (accurate, curriculum-relevant, appropriately challenging, culturally appropriate, engaging) and language criteria (level of vocabulary and syntax, density, text type, availability of visual support, opportunity for learner output). Authentic materials - real subject texts, diagrams, video, news, data - bring genuine language and motivation, but often carry high lexical density, complex nominalisation, cultural assumptions and unhelpful length.
Adaptation is usually better than replacement or wholesale simplification. Common techniques: reduce length (select key paragraphs); gloss difficult lexis; support with visuals (label a diagram, add a timeline); reorganise dense prose into a table or flow chart; add a task that makes the text purposeful; provide sentence frames or substitution tables for the output stage; pre-teach only the lexis genuinely needed for the task; add thinking frames such as 'cause → effect' charts. An alternative is elaboration - keeping the content but adding redundancy, examples and paraphrase - which preserves conceptual challenge while improving comprehensibility.
Materials should also reflect multimodality (text, image, sound, realia) and support learner autonomy - glossaries, answer keys for self-checking, guided reading questions.
Traps: assuming authentic material is always best regardless of level; confusing simplification (removing content and complex ideas) with adaptation; adapting language but leaving the task's language demand unplanned; choosing a text for its topic while ignoring its readability; forgetting that adapted materials must remain accurate to the subject.
Rule of thumb: adapt the language and the task, preserve the concept - then check with a subject colleague that the science, history or maths is still correct.