They say Bad English is the most commonly spoken language in the world nowadays, and there is certainly a large grain of truth in the statement that you can get yourself understood with English almost anywhere, no matter how bad it is. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be improving your English, does it?
In Finland, it is very common for upper secondary school students to be working beside their studies, be it in cafés, restaurants, or supermarkets. The need to speak English in customer service is self-evident. Also, the secondary school is, of course, a necessary step towards higher education. And in higher education, Bad English will no longer do – Finnish universities require students to read and more often now also to write in English. In order to acquire sufficient English skills, we need to practice them in secondary education. It is hard to imagine a better tool for that than CLIL!
At the beginning of May 2024, over 450 students from Hämeenlinna’s upper secondary schools gathered for three days at the Hämeenlinna University of Applied Sciences (HAMK, Hämeenlinnan Ammattikorkeakoulu) to participate in something we call “LukioDiili”, “High School Deal” in English. The aim is to acquaint the students with higher education, and in this case especially the ways in which business is being taught at the HAMK. Although the teaching itself was not done in English, and CLIL was not specifically applied, many of the cases the students were given required the use of English in different ways: searching for information, branding, commercializing the product for non-Finnish-speaking users etc.
One integral task of upper secondary education is to provide students with the necessary skills to enter higher education. Our experiences with CLIL as well as the LukioDiili have opened up the understanding of how to integrate a foreign language into everyday teaching of our subjects. As for now, our steps are only baby steps, but as baby steps often are, they are necessary for the road ahead.
