Another component under development in the TL2L project is the CLIL Database, an useful tool in bilingual education. In this web-based database students will be able to look up terminology in English, which CLIL tutors and their students have uploaded. We hope the CLIL Terminology Database will become a useful tool for students who study one or more subjects in English, and for their tutors.

At the moment a preview of the concept for the new CLIL Database is availiable on this website. The preview consists of a single history text in which key terminology has been linked to pages containing translations, explanations and visual and audio support. The purpose of the preview is to demonstrate the content, functioning and lay-out of the CLIL-database.

Original plans for the CLIL database

The CLIL Terminolgy Database was designed in 2000 as part of the CLIL training programme for teaching staff at the Amsterdam Faculty of Education. While making new content modules in English, teaching staff (who are content specialists, but not linguists) add terminology in English to the database that they find useful for themselves and for learners who will participate in the module. The database thus has two objectives: the teacing staff will expand their knowledge of English terminology and the learners will be able to consult the database while taking English-medium modules.

Although originally designed for EFA staff and learners, tutors and learners from other schools and institutes of higher education are welcome to use the database too. This will be beneficial in two ways.

• First, the larger the number of tutors that add terminology, the more useful the database will become. Institutes that offer CLIL can thus pool their resources and share information.
• Secondly, as it is now, the CLIL Terminology Database is a pilot version. Learning from experiences of users from EFA as well as outside, we will be able to redesign the database.