Newton's Laws in a New Language Context: Content and Language Integrated Learning in English and Physics
European educational systems, aligned with the decisions taken by the Council of Europe, are making great efforts to improve students' command of foreign languages, as there are many students who leave compulsory education with a limited ability to communicate in a foreign language despite the fact that foreign language learning is considered to be one of the key competences in Europe. As for Greece, a lot of reforms have taken place in an effort to incorporate multilingualism, skill development, critical thinking and multi literacies connected to multimodality of texts in modern environments of communication into the foreign languages Curriculum. At the cutting edge of education in Greece, the Model Experimental Schools (attracting excellent students from different sociocultural backgrounds) promote and support experimental practices of curricula, teaching methods and material, and innovative and creative actions, one of which is CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) This is because CLIL is believed to improve students' linguistic competence, develop students' skills and learning strategies, and enhance motivation and critical thinking. In this context, CLIL, integrating English and Physics, is being implemented in the 1st grade of the 2nd Model Experimental Upper High School of Thessaloniki this year. Formative and summative assessment is to examine the effectiveness of the approach in an educational environment, where the teaching language is Greek and English has little social presence, as well as investigate any influences on the degree of comprehension of the Physics content relative to a control group taught the same material in their native Greek language. A questionnaire at the end of the project is going to explore students' attitude towards CLIL Key words: Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) language competence, teaching language, content, culture, communication, assessment.