Foreign Language Competence in Content and Language Integrated Courses

European educational systems are making great efforts to improve students’ command of foreign languages, as there are many students who leave compulsory education with only the most limited ability to communicate in a foreign language. In this context the implementation of CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) courses is becoming commonplace throughout Europe, because this approach is believed to significantly improve overall language competence in the target language. This paper examines the implementation of CLIL in the Basque Country (Spain), a bilingual community in which both Basque and Spanish are official languages and where English represents the third language included in the curriculum. The results show that the CLIL approach is successful and helps to improve students’ foreign language competence even in bilingual contexts where English has little social presence.