Innovative development of schooling goes hand in hand with students being educated multilingually. The Government of the Saarland Federal State are currently promoting French as an obligatory language in nursery and primary schools. Continuing multilingualism at secondary schools thus guarantees educational sustainability. The language concept of our school is indebted to the program ‘towards-European-education-area‘ as proclaimed by the EU commission in Gothenburg in 2017 envisaging multilingualism by the year 2025. Social changes as triggered by immigration make it inevitable for schools to integrate even more languages than those mentioned above. Turkish, for example, other languages being spoken natively by students at our school require new concepts of language acquisition going way beyond those methods that have become established for German natives over the decades. Teachers now have to reduce, even replace, the traditional monolingual habitus by a multi-, translingual method of language-teaching which needs to be forward-looking and trend-setting. It has to go beyond traditional monolingual language-learning and –teaching, promoting transculturalism and internationalism at our school.
CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) is a dual-focussed approach in which an additional language is used for the learning and teaching of both content and language. Over the past three decades, Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) has become a well-established and popular approach for developing an additional language through other curricular domains (e.g., history, music, art, geography or religion) in secondary and increasingly also in primary schools in Europe. CLIL is underpinned by the belief that language development is promoted through application and exploration in meaningful contexts associated with content learning, while the development of content knowledge and skills is promoted by focusing on their linguistic foundations and the learning thereof. However, it also places specific demands on teachers associated with the integration of content and language didactics, and whilst a great deal of research has been conducted over the years to understand the nature and outcomes of CLIL, there remains a critical need for research into how integrated learning is realized in the classroom. The project, however, did not manage the classical way of CLIL.