Language and culture are interconnected and teaching a language should also be concerned with offering learners a wide range of opportunities to gain insights into other cultures. Content and language integrated learning (CLIL) approaches have an invaluable contribution to make towards developing learners’ intercultural understanding (ICU), by making the content culturally relevant to the language of instruction. Within this paradigm, this paper presents the findings of an action-based research project seeking to develop ICU among secondary learners of French in England, through the teaching of a series of lessons following a CLIL approach. Stemming from its findings, it is proposed here that a renewed understanding of CLIL be defined, in which CLIL would stand for