CLIL in tertiary education: first course of Nursing studies using textbooks with the help of ICTs

Abstract

In the last 2 decades, Bilingual education methodologies have been recently implemented across Europe at universities. There have been changes leading to new structuring of the existing university programs and consequently, English language has been considered a reality in this type of education since nowadays, it is a paramount skill to use in this globalized society. In this work, we have included a theoretical study on the CLIL methodology (Content and Language Integrated Learning), as well as its principles and main features, especially following soft-CLIL principles, in which the final proposal is based on. The study’s main objective is to design a soft CLIL didactic unit in the language subject for first grade of the Nursing degree at university following the 4Cs framework and using a suitable textbook and ICTs. To accomplish that, there are specific goals to consider too. Firstly, we have revised CLIL core features, as mentioned above, and the use of textbooks and ICTs in CLIL settings and analyzed the suitability of two different Nursing language textbooks to design CLIL learning situations. Therefore, some digital tools are presented throughout the design of the intervention proposal, since we consider they play an important role to teach content, present any of the 4Cs and provide students with digital competences. Finally, we reflect on the possibility of extending this study by making a whole revision of the contents presented during the first grade of Nursing studies after having implemented the present proposal for one of the units. Besides, we think that another key point that could be interesting is the collaboration of content and language teachers to successfully implement hard CLIL principles in the current university and moving beyond soft CLIL in the language subject.