Teaching content through Dutch as a second language

Within the Netherlands, Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) in foreign language teaching can be considered a sibling of ‘Language Oriented Content Teaching’ (LOCT), a pedagogy in mainstream classes with second language learners of Dutch, where Dutch is used as language of instruction. This article characterizes two decades of research on LOCT through Dutch in multilingual schools and discusses its relevance for CLIL development. A distinctive feature is the discourse coalition between subject and language researchers, teacher educators, curriculum development staff and others. Their cooperation furthered the identification of disciplinary literacies and subject specific language pedagogies which can be seen as a renewed conceptualization of content obligatory language (Snow, Met, & Genesee, 1989). LOCT work in the Dutch context shows how content obligatory language that is relevant and feasible can be identified and included in content teachers’ pedagogies, findings that might be useful for the further development of CLIL.