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traditional macro-skills, (reading, writing, speaking and
listening), and going beyond the language they need for
social interaction, or Basic Interpersonal Communication
Skills (BICS) . Besides, English does not possess a
complete hegemony any longer. It is true that it is growing
as a lingua franca in many countries but those countries are
also strengthening other languages like Mandarin, Spanish,
French, German, Russian, among others. This brings about
that the “purity” of the language cannot be maintained by
regulation; besides, “lack of a native-speaker accent will not
be seen, therefore, as a sign of poor competence” (Graddol,
2006, p. 117).
In the Latin American context, institutions that decide
to adopt CLIL need to follow a series of steps to do it
successfully; they should select contents and materials
carefully, design the curriculum properly and provide
teachers with high quality training to get the ideal results.
Perhaps, it will take time to achieve the objectives stated
by the institutions but the effort is worth it. Besides, Ball´s
(2012) considerations should be taken into account since
not all countries, schools or institutions can put CLIL into
practice at its fullest. There are a wide range of possibilities
going from a weak application, implementing topic-based
language classes as done in countries like Argentina, where
teachers prepare their lessons around different topics or
themes, whereas in Mexico stronger forms of CLIL are
carried out and offered as an added value in most private
schools. On the other extreme of the scale, we find countries
such as Basque where immersion schools are common.
It is not a simple task to decide whether CLIL is the