Are Accredited Teachers Equally Trained for CLIL? The CLIL Teacher Paradox

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is a challenging and demanding teaching approach; despite this, in Spain, linguistic competence is the only criterion considered by most bilingual programmes to enable teachers to teach CLIL. This article reports on a quantitative study into the impact that the different accreditation processes carried out by the administration, the inservice training received by CLIL teachers and their English proficiency, have on inservice CLIL teachers' competences for CLIL. An ad hoc instrument was created to measure the level of integration of the CLIL methodological principles in the accredited teachers of 47 primary and secondary bilingual schools. Results show that 70% of a sample of 383 practising teachers accessed their bilingual programme without CLIL methodological training and 50% of them had not received any type of CLIL training after the accreditation. Furthermore, significant differences in the level of integration of the CLIL methodological principles have been found between the teachers accredited with methodological training and those without it, in favour of the former. It is concluded that the accreditation process should include a combined linguistic and methodological rating likely to solve this CLIL teacher paradox.