LEARNING WITH CLIL

Although most people study English (or other foreign language) for years, they usually finish their studies without communicating efficiently with other people in this language. It's a real nightmare because you feel that all the hours of learning have been a waste of time. However, some weeks ago I found out a methodology called CLIL which can improve the method of learning a second language. I found it very interesting and motivating for pupils, that’s the reason why I have tried to learn more about it.

Perhaps you would like to know what CLIL is

If you don't know what CLIL is, I invite you to read this post because I am going to explain some interesting aspects about it.

As you can see CLIL is an acronym, each letter belongs to a concept.

CLIL is an educational approach for teaching and in general it refers to any learning context in which contents and a language, different than native tongue, are integrated in order to satisfy specific educational objectives where the two elements receive equal importance. In other words, different curricular subjects are taught through the medium of a non mother tongue (Bentley, 2010).

In order to understand better concepts of CLIL, you can refer to the following video.

Maybe you would like to know where CLIL comes from

I wondered where the idea of this methodology came from, that’s the reason why I started to read some documents. Here you can read the most relevant that I’ve found.

According to Hanesová (2015) two significant pedagogues of Central European region, Comenius (1592-1670) and  Matthias Bel (1684-1749), thought about “learning foreign languages in their real context and their integration with meaningful subject content” (p.8). The writer told us that around the 70s, some regions had designed language and content integrated programmes in order to provide children a bilingual instruction and, at the same time, acquiring language skills for authentic communication and understanding with natives of the area (Hanesová, 2015). Indeed, success of these programmes drew the interest of people who worked in language policies. In addition, more and more different “schools in Europe began to teach some subjects in a foreign language” (Hanesová, 2015, p.9).

As Hanesová (2015) told us, David Marsh is the person who adopts CLIL as acronym. However, at first the original concept “was used to designate teaching subjects to students through a foreign language” (Hanesová, 2015, p.10). For Marsh (1994) adopting CLIL means that a foreign language is utilised to teach a certain subject. Moreover, learning subjects, like science or art through an extra language, can increase positive attitudes in pupils (Marsh, 2000).

In this video you can see an entertainting interview to David Marsh where he answers some interesting questions as seen below:

Interview questions

How did you become involved with CLIL?

In which situations have you seen CLIL working best?

Have you ever seen it fail?

Will CLIL eventually replace other methods of language teaching?

What advice would you give to teachers who are concerned about the amount of work involved in setting up a CLIL programme?

Are some personality types better suited to teaching CLIL than others?

Which areas of CLIL research should researchers be prioritizing?

Possibly you would like to know what role a teacher of CLIL takes

Surfing on the Internet I found out this video.

If you see it, you’ll find an interesting conference by Carmel M. Coonan who tells us some relevant aspects about of the role of a CLIL teacher.

Anyway, I write some ideas below:

CLIL teachers as a planner: because they need to specify aims and objectives, they need to choose what academic content are more interesting to teach in a particular language. Moreover teachers are conscious that learning a language takes longer.

CLIL teachers as a language user: this signifies that teachers will need to be able to do monologues (dialogues, explanation, description, narrative) because they are using a foreign language to explain the lesson or to respond to students questions so they will need to be able to manage a foreign language in classroom management.

CLIL teachers as a language promoter: this mean that they need to be competent in adopting strategies for promotion. Likewise, they need to look at objectives, strategies and materials easy to understand. 

CLIL teachers as a protector of the epistemology of the discipline: this involves that pupils need to learn correctly and efficiently through new ways of learning the language. Writing and speaking have a double function for CLIL situation, they can help learning the content and they can help learning the language. Language teaching methodology has a very excellent tradition of learning strategies that could easily be introduce into the non language discipline classroom in facilitating group work.

CLIL teachers as a material designer: this suggests that they need to be able to identify materials on line, adapt and integrate them.

CLIL teachers as a evaluator: this purports that teachers are going to evaluate the content and the language at the same time.

CLIL teachers as a team partner: this means that the team has to be creative because members of the team have look to gain one from the other.

CLIL teachers as a methodological innovator this signifies that teachers need to do changes in teaching language.

Mayhap you would like to know how to bring CLIL into your classroom

Now it’s the time to discover some rules or advice in order to prepare your CLIL lesson. The following video by Oxford Discover tells us that:

When pupils are learning a new lesson they have the opportunity to use four skills… reading, writing, listening and speaking in order to learn about the topic. Another important issue is that if teachers use CLIL lessons, they’ll help children to connect language to real life. As well as learning vocabulary, grammar and language skills in a natural way by asking questions or checking answers. Moreover, CLIL lesson are motivating and fun!!

Now you can see some steps that you should use in your CLIL lessons:

1. Choose an interesting topic.

2. Choose the target vocabulary that you want to focus on the lesson and depending on the level.

3. Choose the grammar structure to focus on.

4. Use a reading text like an article in relation with the topic, you can find it surfing on the internet or in a magazine.

5. Create a graphic organizer, which allow your students to think clearly and underline the information they have learnt.

6. Give students the opportunity to use this information creatively through written or speaking assignments.

Finally, I suppose you would like to know how CLIL works in a real class

The video below shows us how CLIL works in a real classroom. There are three different subjects where teachers use English language to explain and work a specific topic. They are fun and children enjoy it a lot!!

Clearly, I invite you to see the video but first let me explain an example.

In the video we can see how a teacher introduces one topic (electricity) through an amazing video about it. After that it’s the time of vocabulary activities, one is a memory game. Firstly, teacher gives students some targets with vocabulary and children memorize it. Then, pupils ask questions to other classmates. Other activity is ask a question like this “what do you use the electricity for?” And they write some vocabulary answering the question. An interesting activity is that all students do classification of the new vocabulary using a big mural.

After vocabulary, children read information in real stuff, try to understand it and to compare the information. Other activity is look for information surfing on the Internet, for example, teacher set out a question about consumption, after children use a computer in order to look for information. They also have to calculate electricity consumption and costs. Finally, as for testing the knowledge acquired, teacher asks questions and pupils show answers.

If you watch this video, you can notice some examples where a topic is presented in different ways and you can perceive steps above of each one.

This is a fragment focused on Primary Education, the original video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFuCrxRobh0   (Six videos demonstrating CLIL used in classes from primary schools and vocational colleges)

In these links you can find extra information about CLIL.

http://www.onestopenglish.com/clil/what-is-clil/

http://www.isabelperez.com/clil/

http://ihjournal.com/content-and-language-integrated-learning

https://www.tesol.org/connect/tesol-resource-center/search-details/teaching-tips/2015/06/26/tkt-clil-(content-and-language-integrated-learning)-exam-resources

References:

Hanesová, D. (2015). History of CLIL. In S. Pokrivčáková et al., CLIL in Foreign Language Education: e-textbook for foreign language teachers. Nitra: Constantine the Philosopher University. Recovered from http://www.tedu.edu.tr/sites/default/files/content_files/research_files/e-textbook_clil_in_fle_-_final2.pdf

Marsh, D. (1994). Bilingual Education & Content and Language Integrated Learning. International Association for Cross-cultural Communication, Language Teaching in the Member States of the European.

Teaching Knowledge Test (TKT) CLIL Handbook for Teachers.  Cambridge English Online Shop. Recovered from http://www.mycambridgeshop.ch/Teaching-Knowledge-Test-TKT-Content-and-Language-Integrated-Learnig-CLILI-Teachers-Handbook