Education of the republic of uzbekistan termiz state university department of english language and literature

Research rationale
In September 2009 four primary school children wanted to attend private English classes – two boys and two girls. They were all aged ten and did not know each other. The children were excellent students at school and had good grades in English as well. However, their knowledge of the language was not satisfactory to themselves or their parents.

The children had a few things in common:

(1) They were overburdened with extracurricular activities (one of the children was engaged in seven different activities – swimming, tennis, volleyball, ballet, choir, German and English),

(2) They were dissatisfied with their knowledge of English,

(3) They were the brains of the class and were suffering from not being the best in English too,

(4) They had developed negative feelings towards the language and were reluctant to speak,

(5) They were not very motivated to learn,

(6) They refused to be taught in the traditional way (using a course book).

The task set by the teacher was twofold: (1) help students achieve the mastery of the language by motivating them and (2) help students improve their English school grades. The only way to aid the situation seemed to be to rely on students’ knowledge and motivation for learning other school subjects and build up English classes around the themes they were interested in. CLIL was the most appropriate solution even if it was not clear enough at that very moment whether it could be applied to teaching individual classes.