Asian Journal of Humanities and Social Studies (ISSN: 2321 – 2799) Volume 02 – Issue 05, October 2014 Asian Online Journals (www.ajouronline.com ) 719 Exploring CLIL in English as a Second Language (ESL) Lessons at the Tertiary Level: A Pilot Study at a Public University in Sabah, Malaysia Suhaida Omar 1 , and Joan James 2 1 Senior Lecturer, TESL Programme Faculty of Psychology and Education, Universiti Malaysia Sabah, Sabah, Malaysia Email: suhaida.omar {at} gmail.com 2 M.Ed student, TESL Programme Faculty of Psychology and Education, Universiti Malaysia Sabah, Sabah, Malaysia _________________________________________________________________________________ ABSTRACT—This paper outlines a pilot study on exploring the possibilities of implementing the Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) approach in English lessons at a local public university. The participants were fifteen undergraduates who were considered as low-intermediate English learners and they were from different faculties. They were placed as an experimental group and exposed to the CLIL approach for ten weeks. Throughout the lessons, the participants’ language progress was observed through formative and summative assessments and at the end of the semester they were asked to fill in the questionnaire about their perceptions on CLIL. The tests showed a gradual improvement in terms of their language proficiency and the results from the questionnaires indicated students’ positive responses. It can be concluded that CLIL is a useful approach in motivating students to learn English for authentic purposes and in a less traditional way. Keywords— CLIL, integrated language learning, English _________________________________________________________________________________ 1. INTRODUCTION CLIL refers to “Content and Language Integrated Learning”, a term created by David Marsh in 1994 and as the term suggests, the learning of a subject is integrated with language learning in CLIL classes. In other words, CLIL promotes the dual-focused approach in which the language functions more than a tool to learn another subject (or contents of the subject). Its advantage is that it aims to help students to develop and increase their proficiency in another language, usually a second or foreign language. That being said, CLIL proved to be a hopeful educational approach which integrates learning content along with a foreign language (Mehisto et al, 2008; Coyle et al, 2010). A number of research studies on CLIL in language classrooms have been carried out all around the globe. For example, Luczywek (2009) describes the historical implementation of CLIL in Poland which has undergone some education reformation and has promoted the teaching and learning across curriculum. The new policy emphasised on integrating several subjects and one of the studies by Luczywek tested the results of using English in teaching History and Literature and stated that, the learners practised a lot of structures e.g. simple sentences: imperatives, questions, answers and requests in simple present and simple past tenses, and the expression ‘to be going to do something’ and learned a lot of vocabulary (Luczywek , 2009:49). The researcher also claimed that the students were highly motivated in participating in other activities such as writing a storybook and performing in the classroom theatre. Another research was by Martinez (2009) who started a project work through CLIL for learners as young as 6-7 years old in Science, History and Geography. Although it was a challenge, she reported that at the end of the project, the students “...feel motivated to contribute...to the project” and eventually the students themselves “...were an active part in their learning process” (Martinez, 2009: 67). The key point was that CLIL could motivate students to learn actively and consequently perform well in their studies.