The paper begins by approaching the concept of CLIL (Content and Language Integrated
Learning) providing a brief overview of the history of bilingual education. The influence of the linguistic
policies of the European Union is discussed along with some beliefs about language teaching and how both
have influenced the celerity of CLIL implementation, momentum and expansion. There are some indicators
of the lack of a theoretical framework for CLIL, of insufficient teacher education and or inadequacy
of materials. It is necessary to reflect systematically on to what extent commercially published textbooks
match the demands of bilingual education. The second section centers on CLIL textbooks, mainly those
commercialized by publishers, by referring to some recent studies which attempt to approach systematically
their design and use. Since, by definition CLIL includes both content and language, our research question
is if content books (in English) also include content and language objectives. A corpus of 25 books from
different subjects, years, and publishers is analyzed. The analysis shows an insufficient presence of linguistic
objectives. Some reflections are made about this scarcity with the warning that this lack could hindrance
an efficient implementation of CLIL. Thus, it could be said that these textbooks are not the product of
discipline or didactic considerations but the result of the logic of market, publishers and linguistic policy.
