IMPLEMENTATION OF CONTENT AND LANGUAGE INTEGRATED LEARNING IN THE INDIAN CLASSROOM FOR PROMOTING MULTILINGUALISM AMONG LEARNERS

Multilingual classrooms are becoming more common around the globe due to mass migration of people and also because of global trade and commerce. Learners need to be multilingual in order to succeed transnationally as the world is becoming a global knowledge center. India is a linguistically diverse nation where multilingual classrooms are common. But generally, this multilingualism is limited to social conversations. Learners fail to acquire academic language proficiency in their second, third or any other additionallanguage. So, teachers should follow a language teaching approach which can motivate and help the learners in acquiring academic language proficiency in the second or third language. This paper suggests that content and language integrated learning (CLIL) is a viable language teaching approach which can be helpful in teaching second or any additional language in the Indian classroom. The paper explains the benefits of CLIL in language teaching and presents a sample lesson framed by the author to teach English language through Social Science content at the elementary school level. In the discussion part, the author explains that similar lessons can be framed in any language to teach both content and language. Thus, this approach will be helpful in promoting multilingualism in the Indian classrooms.