Teaching language and content in multicultural and multilingual classrooms: CLIL

book review

attachment to Yiddishespecially to its nineteenth-and twentieth-century secular revolutionary expressionsare powerful. Again, occasional slips lurk in 'Yiddish-Yiddish' phenomena. For example, he uncritically accepts the conclusion of an English paper on Hasidic Yiddish that 'Yiddish is definitive of Hasidic masculinity' (69). But in many Hasidic girls' schools, where Talmudic studies are excluded, there is considerably more time allotted for Yiddish language texts and study. The best (and indispensable) dictionary of modern Hasidic Yiddish, Yidish verter oytser, is by Baila Roth of New York stateand the second best, which appeared in Israel, is also by a woman author. The best Hasidic Yiddish family magazine, Máyles, was founded and is edited by Sarah Jungreis. In the historical chapters, the book is often strong on generalisations, but slips up on detail. Contrary to the author's claims, Y.M. Lifschitz's nineteenth-century dictionarieswhile masterpieces of Yiddish lexicography (particularly of Southeastern or Ukrainian Yiddish)did not 'introduce enduring principles of Yiddish spelling' (77). None of its innovations were ever adopted by anyone.
The author's contention that early nineteenth-century East European Yiddish folk spelling used nekúdes (diacritics) plus the modern German inspired 'silent ayin' are wrong, as is his prime example: ' (75). In fact, modern standard Yiddish and its spelling come straight from the nineteenth-century religious translations of sacred texts; they use (with older Yiddish zero or yud, the former variant matching the modern standard). As it happens, Shandler reproduces elsewhere (on page 123) a splendid example: the facsimile of a page of a Hasidic tale in a 1902 reprint. Howlers could have been avoided by having a Yiddish-Yiddish scholar look the work over before publication. One of these is the remark (on page 132) that the Soviet spelling of apikóyres ( (with historic universal s as final consonant) derived from Epicurus, the Greek philosopher. It is not correct that only writers and groups 'affiliated with the Communist party' (78) used phoneticised spelling of Semitic-derived elements. This was also the practice of Inzikhístn (introspectivists), among others, in an era of grand and radical interwar literary experimentation.
The author is quite right to note that only four volumes of the Yiddish-Yiddish Great Dictionary of the Yiddish language (by Joffe and Mark) have appeared in print. It is important to add that, at his death in 1975, Yudl Mark left index cards for the entire dictionary. Debates that Shandler describes in other contexts are among the reasons that further volumes did not appear. Some said subsequent volumes must include English, some insisted on Hebrew, and others said the work must shift to every last detail of the holy 'Yivo spelling'. One hopes that scholars will put the entire dictionary online, and publicising its existence is a constructive step towards that end.
Unlike many scholars, Shandler has no problem mentioning the actual violence against Yiddish writers and culture in Palestine/Israel that was part of a campaign to destroy the language in the Holy Land. Turning to the current state of affairs, he also has the courage (and it takes courage in mainstream Jewish circles) to assert, correctly, that Modern Hebrew 'has relatively few speakers outside of Israel' (177). I would love to see his response to the more radical assertion that outside Israel there is not a single Jewish family on the planetnone of its members having lived in or come from Israelthat uses Hebrew in daily life. Given the author's talent for fearlessly discussing 'difficult issues' in persuasive prose, and for wading into controversial issues, he leaves readers wishing for more (perhaps not a bad thing!). Substantive issues include the continuing boycott of Yiddish as a serious subject by nearly all Hebrew day schools in America, and the continued under-representation (ignoring, belittling and abusing) of the language in mainstream Jewish culturewhether of the Hebrew/Israel-centric or the modern religious varieties. These topics could be investigated further by this talented author with a gift for writing about subjects about which others are often reticent.
Shandler's welcome contribution to these important debates moves the field forward, and should inspire more enquirybut readers must beware of 'delinguification'. (I leave the biographical-biological correlate thereof to the reader's imagination.) Note 1. I was persuaded by some readers of drafts of my own Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish (2004, revised ed. 2007) to replace biography-derived termsand so I am pleased to see them put to such fine use by Shandler. Teaching language and content in multicultural and multilingual classrooms: CLIL and EMI approaches, edited by María Luisa Carrió-Pastor and Begoña Bellés-Fortuño, Cham, Switzerland, Springer, 2021, pp. xix + 377, €149.99 (pbk), ISBN 978-3-03056-614-2

Dovid Katz
There appears to be a shift in English-language educationfrom teaching English as a foreign language (EFL), to content and language integrated learning (CLIL), to the use of English as a medium of instruction (EMI). While this book provides a rationale for CLIL in comparison to other practices, it also presents information on many aspects of CLIL and EMI programmes.
Besides introductory and concluding remarks, the volume comprises three sections. The first, with two chapters, attempts to clarify the blurred boundaries between CLIL and EMI. These highlight the differences between the two, and go on to discuss focus-group interviews with experienced lecturers. Despite recognising the benefits of integrating English to improve their practice, the teachers were concerned about the rapidity of implementation and lack of consideration of long-term benefits to students.
There are five chapters in the second section of the book, which deals mainly with EMI teaching practices in higher education. Drawing upon surveys and interviews with both teachers and students, one study indicates the potential of EMI for promoting intercultural competence, and suggests the re-evaluation of EMI objectives in European universities. The next chapter looks at both content-based instruction (CBI) and CLIL), investigating teacher training in pedagogical linguistics. Analysing teachers' self-reports about the degree to which they include their language knowledge in CBI lessons, and assessing their written CBI lesson plans, the authors point out specific priorities for the achievement of CBI learning goals. Other chapters in this section report on EMI lecturers' classroom role in classrooms, and suggest improvements in teaching practice and pedagogical resources.
Section 3 also comprises five chapters. The general aim here is to investigate CLIL instructional practices at at all levels of education. The first chapter looks at foreign literature in CLIL methodologies; the authors present a model of literary, communicative and intercultural competencies, and then test it with a case study. In the next, a CLIL training course is examined from the perspectives of both students and trainers, and linguistic-policy strategies are discussed. A third chapter introduces a CLIL teaching model, emphasising the significance of maintaining an equitable balance between language and content assessment and shedding light on the controversial issue of the assessment of CLIL. The essential concepts of CLIL and the feelings of teachers who use it are also presented in this section, and suggestions are made for reconsidering CLIL methodology.