Taking advantage of sustainable development goals in project based CLIL: an international experience to enhance communication among primary students

Abstract

One of the educational challenges that European countries face nowadays is to include the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into their curriculums so that they could be achieved in 2030. Currently, the Catalan government has incorporated them into the last updated basic education curriculum in 2022. Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) and Project Based Learning (PBL) have shown their effectiveness to boost collaborative work and communicative competence. Furthermore, the inclusion of the SDGs in an international context could increase students’ motivation towards the learning of English as a foreign language. This article presents the design, implementation and the students’ outcomes of an international project that was carried out in English with primary students from Barcelona, Bogotá and Toronto. The results of Spanish students seem to suggest that they are motivated to participate in communicative situations when they are engaged in an international blended CLIL-PBL project on global issues related to SDGs. A welcoming and trusting environment is created in class so the engagement of most of the students rises, the feeling of belonging to a community is strengthened and their willingness of communicating in English is enhanced.