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The acquisition of L2 Grammar in CLIL 
Foreign language education has adopted an increasingly communicative 
and intercultural emphasis during the past decades. Modern foreign language 
instruction draws primarily on the principles of communicative language 
teaching (CLT). The goal is to develop the pupils’ communicative competence, 
which has four components: grammatical, discourse, sociolinguistic and strategic 
competence. Grammatical competence includes the knowledge of e.g. 
vocabulary, word formation, syntax, spelling, and pronunciation. Discourse 
competence involves knowledge of the conventions, coherence and cohesion of 
the language. Sociolinguistic competence refers to the knowledge required to use 
the language appropriately in different social contexts, such as form and 
function, registers and roles, while strategic competence is the skill to use 
efficient communication strategies. 
Communicative language teaching is based on the view that language is 
learned primarily by taking part in meaningful interaction and carrying out 
authentic communicative tasks, defined by Nunan as a “piece of classroom 
work which involves learners in comprehending, manipulating, producing or 
interacting in the target language while their attention is principally focused on 
meaning rather than the form”. Communicative tasks involve, for example, 
problem solving, group work and collaborative learning. 
4.3 Modern approaches in CLIL to teaching upper grade pupils 
There are a number of claims made for the advantages of CLIL, although it 
is difficult to substantiate them. One is that it can develop foreign language 
ability more effectively than conventional foreign language teaching does. What 

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it certainly can do is to prepare pupils for future study and the workplace 
where they are likely to need to operate in English. 
An advantage for language teachers is that the content is ready-made. This 
takes away the need to spend a lot of time thinking up topics that work and 
engage the pupils. It is also likely that the pupils are more motivated when they 
are learning through English something that is part of their school learning and 
thinking, rather than just learning the language, which may or may not seem to 
them to have an obvious purpose. Only minority of young people have an 
interest in words for their own sake. In CLIL the language is very clearly means 
to an end. Many children at a very young age so that when they reach secondary 
school they do not want to repeat the same language lessons. 
The research done by Howard Gardner into multiple intelligences is 
highly relevant here. When we are teaching another subject through a foreign 
language it is likely that we will draw on more of the intelligences and this is 
likely to be helpful to our learners. The linguistic intelligence, which is 
prevalent in language teaching, is supported by the intelligences required for