Moving Towards CLIL 2.0: A Proposal for Social Media Integration in Content- and Language-Integrated Learning

Introduction

The 21^st century has experienced a profound evolution when it comes to the use and presence of technology. In this sense, the development of the Internet has supposed a revolution in human life, especially in the field of interaction (Tavakoli & Wijesinghe, 2019). The world has evolved from the first Web 1.0, characterised by the consumption of online content, into Web 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0, moving from its origins in the 1950s, to its initial versions of the Internet implemented in universities and research centres during the 1960s and 1970s, to a later new commercial stage in the 1980s, and to its current social phase in the 2010s (Cohen-Almagor, 2011).

Over the last decades, the influence of the Internet on our daily routines has drastically grown. At this juncture, online social media has become the main platform of information dissemination, and Internet-enhanced activities such as online shopping or e-mail have become routines for citizens all over the world (Filsinger & Freitag, 2019). People can now obtain instant information from a variety of social platforms as well as share their texts, pictures and videos (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, …). Although it is unequivocal that these technologies can contribute to the world’s progress at different scales (not only social but also political, economic and cultural), they are also challenging in some ways (Nedelkoska & Quintini, 2018; Sorbe, Gal, Nicoletti, & Timiliotis, 2019): they can both help create new professional opportunities and destroy certain employment as a result of task automatization (Gal, Nicoletti, Renault, Sorbe, & Timiliotis, 2019). As Sorbe, Gal, Nicoletti and Timiliotis (2019) point out, “new technologies make it possible to automate an increasing share of tasks, and a key challenge is to enable the transition of displaced workers to new tasks, jobs, firms and sometimes industries” (p. 19). In this context, it could be said that the 21^st-century society (known as the Information/Network Society) demands knowledge and new skills for citizens to be competent enough to participate in the world of today. Among such demands, linguistic, communicative and intercultural abilities arise as the main requirements for individuals to acquire and develop. For this reason, many European countries develop bilingual/multilingual education programs in order to promote proficiency both in non-linguistic and linguistic subjects and to foster plurilingualism and intercultural awareness among citizens (Council of Europe, 2001). These programs, based on Canadian language immersion plans and the Indian Bangalore project, follow the CLIL approach, which seeks learning a foreign language (FL) and contents in a simultaneous way by teaching non-linguistic areas in the FL (Coyle, Hood, & Marsh, 2010; Gómez, 2017; Roldán, 2012). In Europe, CLIL development has increased considerably over the last twenty years as a response to European Commission’s guidelines seeking the promotion of FL learning among citizens (European Commission, 1995) based on the increasing internationalization and mobility which highlights the importance of languages. In words of Nikula, Dalton-Puffer and Llinares:

Traditional methodologies do not work anymore as the world is becoming highly influenced by technology. For this reason, teachers in particular and educational institutions in general need to consider the potential of social media and take advantage of them. In words of Ulbrich, Jahnke and Mårtensson: