The Impact of Globalization on the Italian University Teaching: CLIL Implementation and Teacher Training

Globalization has had a significant impact on all aspects of society including education. There seems to be an increasing necessity to promote a bilingual education at all levels in order to allow easier mobility of people in all working and academic settings. In the last few decades Europe, in particular, has been interested in promoting new ways of teaching. In 1995, the European Commission´s White Paper, Teaching and learning - Towards the learning society, stated that “Upon completing initial training everyone should be proficient in two Community foreign languages” (ibid.:47). This objective could be achieved by implementing the so-called ‘Content and Language Integrated Learning’ (CLIL) whose aim is to teach non-linguistic or content subjects through the medium of a foreign language. CLIL is undoubtedly an innovative approach to teaching characterised by significant holistic features. It is also very practical and flexible and thus it can be easily incorporated in many ways, with different subjects, languages, types of schools and learners of different age. This is why this paper argues that its implementation at the Italian Universities is entirely justified, feasible and, to a certain extent, needed in order to face increasing competition from other European Universities which have already adopted some bilingual programmes based on CLIL. Nevertheless, for a successful implementation of CLIL special attention needs to be paid to the training of competent teachers. CLIL teachers should have a good command of the target language and be able to help students overcome individual learning difficulties. The aim of this paper is twofold: Firstly, it will highlight the advantages and disadvantages of CLIL implementation at university level; secondly, it will focus on the role and training of CLIL teachers in Italy with particular reference to university lecturers and professors.