Resumen de CLIL-ing pre-primary education: towards a holistic approach to implement CLIL in early childhood education

Ana Otto, Beatriz Cortina Pérez

• Content and Language Integrated Learning, also known as CLIL, has experienced an exponential growth in the last decades as an approach that combines language and content areas, and offers more flexible and real opportunities for language learning. Being an umbrella term encompassing a wide range of situations and contexts, and also due to the most recent policies to increase language learning in the early ages, CLIL has already stepped into the pre-primary levels, and it is expected to expand even more in the near future. But to make the most of this approach, it has to be suited to the main principles of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC), and thus, respect very young learners’ idiosyncratic features in terms of their development and acquisition. The main aim of this introductory chapter is to discuss the potential applicability of CLIL for pre-primary education, and to propose a holistic approach to be considered by practitioners when CLIL is used in the pre-primary levels. The chapter starts with an overview of the expansion of foreign language learning in the early years. It then moves on to CLIL distinguishing features, and the need to tailor CLIL with pre-primary education. Lastly, we propose an attempt to conceptualize CLIL at this educational level.