Editorial: Welcome to CLIL Teacher magazine

Dear Reader,

Welcome to CLIL Teacher, Macmillan's onestopclil magazine for teachers integrating content and language. It's a great pleasure to be involved in this very first issue

So what is CLIL? Content and Language Integrated Learning encapsulates a wide range of teaching and learning contexts so if you teach English using environmental materials or if you teach Geography through the medium of English you can consider yourself part of the CLIL community. Phil Ball in his article, What is CLIL? talks us through the plethora of contexts and definitions being used. This is the first of four pieces from Phil to get us started in defining CLIL. He provides us with his own thoughts on CLIL but takes ideas and quotations from a number of sources and explores them to see how they stand up to investigation from his experienced pen. Further information about the concept of CLIL can also be found in the About section and the Methodology section includes a series of longer articles written on key areas of CLIL methodology and practice. Peeter Mehisto asks the question ' Why CLIL?' and David Marsh examines the 'Driving forces behind CLIL'. There is a practical piece from me on 'Working with Words' and an article from John Clegg on 'Lesson Planning'.

We hope you will share your views on what CLIL is and how you practice it in the classroom in the onestopclil discussion forum. This month I've posted two questions which look at whether or not CLIL is elitist and if CLIL will mean redundancy for traditional language teachers.  Take a look and let us know what you think.

CLIL Teacher is about teachers and is for teachers and as such depends on you for its growth and success so we have asked several colleagues to give us a 'teacher's perspective' on CLIL.  You will find country profiles and views from the classroom this month from Poland, France, Columbia and Bulgaria. This section will be added to each month with perspectives from teachers in new countries where CLIL is happening. Do write in and let us know about CLIL in your country.

We are also inviting colleagues from around the world to share resources with each other in the lesson share area of the site. In addition Macmillan have created a huge bank of classroom resources. If you subscribe to onestopclil you will have at your fingertips a host of materials to download and use in the classroom from Science, History and Geography to cross-curricula English resources. These have been written by subject and ELT specialists and include detailed teacher's guidelines. There are also fantastic games, animations and videos to use on Interactive Whiteboards.

Why don't you see how much you already know about CLIL and take the CLIL quiz!

CLIL Teacher has been set up by teachers for teachers and there are a number of opportunities for you to get involved.  Send us your comments, your views, your reviews or simply add your details to the contacts section and join our growing CLIL Teacher community.

Happy CLILing,

Keith Kelly