Imagine you had a one-to-one with a woman who described herself as technologically challenged. She was given an ipod for Christmas and has been relying on her daughter to download music onto it. She is complaining because her daughter is starting to get bored of her job as a personal IT assistant and without the help, your student is lost. Why not design a lesson that teaches her to manage the ipod for herself?

In no particular order, here is some of the language that you might use for this purpose:

• Cable
• To plug in
• Open iTunes
• Create a new playlist
• To update
• To burn a CD
• Podcast
• Tracks
• The iTunes store
• An mp3 file
• Double click on the song you want to hear

CLIL is often associated with the expression ‘kill 2 birds with one stone’. What we are effectively doing in a lesson like this is teaching English along with something useful or interesting at the same time.

At the 2006 TESOL-Spain round table discussion on CLIL, Anne McCabe put the following idea forward:

“Is it possible to teach language without content or content without language?”

If the answer to this question is, on both accounts ‘no’, then we have to concede that not all content is equal. So what would a content-light English class entail? Well personally, I would put into this category any lesson in which students are forced to listen to some mundane dialogue between dodgy actors on how much or how little excerise they do, or an activity in which students read about how some minor British celebrity’s life has improved since she gave up coffee.

On the other hand, a content-heavy English class would be the IT one mentioned above. Or it could be a class in which the students and their teacher look seriously at topics related to science, art or current affairs.

Of course, I don’t advocate that all English classes for adults should be content heavy. But I do feel that we should do all we can to prevent them from being content-light. Artifice in the classroom is the number one content killer and for this reason, authentic materials may be part of the answer. Thanks to YouTube, image search engines, online newspapers, Wikipedia, image searches, Google Earth, quotations sites, BBC podcast, etc, etc, etc, we have access to an inexhaustible supply of them.

So be kind to your adult students who are learning English for no specific purpose: CLIL them softly.