Resumen de Project Work in CLIL Classrooms: Old Wine in New Bottles
A new arrival in CLIL classes but a classical approach in other fields of education, project work is back again. Its use is soaring in bilingual schools as it seems to satisfy the demands of the new curriculum for content subjects.
More than a hundred years old, its origin dates back to the work of American philosopher John Dewey and pedagogue William Kilpatrick in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
It has been implemented in Spanish schools in three distant periods from each other: it turned to be an innovation in the 1930s Spanish school system, the LOGSE educational reform rescued it for foreign language classes and, at present, it is gaining acceptance among CLIL practitioners.
This chapter revises some of the most recent research, mostly on motivation, and classroom experiences already described in specialized literature, with a particular focus on what is taking place in Spanish schools. The final paragraphs of this paper try to reflect on the reasons why project work has returned successfully to stay in bilingual classes. These reflections might foster new lines of research.
