FACTWorld - Forum for Across the Curriculum Teaching

CLIL - Content and Language Integrated Learning CLIL CLIL - Content and Language Integrated Learning

CLIL - what's in it for the language teachers? Workshop delivered at the CEBS Conference, Bad Hofgastein, Oct 22-24th, 2009 Conference Report here
	This presentation comes from simply being asked to talk about CLIL to an audience of mainly language teachers. As a language teacher myself, I do have ideas about this question relating to my own teaching experiences.
I think there are many places to start to look at the area of CLIL if you're a language teacher. This is a slide which shows some of those places to look first. Each point apart from the first refers to the content curriculum of whichever subject it is you are interested in.
	This is my school in Plovdiv. It is a bilingual school in the Bulgarian state system offering an intensive year in the foreign language where the children have 18 hours per week of language, and then they go on in subsequent years to study some of their content curriculum through the medium of the foreign language. I teach English in the intensive prep year.
One of the groups, 'Zh' class in the prep building last year, 2008.
	We have to start with some sort of definition for CLIL. I don't think CLIL is just a repackaging of a task-based approach with a topic-focus to language learning. My feeling is that for CLIL to be CLIL it has to come from the content curriculum. I think applies also where language teachers are doing CLIL. You may not agree, many don't, and you can engage in debate on this issue in any of the places mentioned: FACTWorld at www.yahoogroups.com Young Learners and Teens onestopclil discussion forum
Macmillan have set up debate on a similar question and you can still access the products of the debate through their website www.onestopclil.com. Some, like Adrian Tennant, argue that having teachers teach their subject through the medium of a foreign language can be a disaster. Others, like Lyubov Dombeva, argue that everyone is a winner. Of course, I'm putting the whole thing into two sentences, so you'll have to go and take a look if you want to read the details. I agree with Lyubov.
	Where we talk about CLIL methodology, for me it has to be a methodology based on what goes on in the subject classroom, in the subject methodology. Then we add language to this methodology and we get CLIL methodology. At the heart of this methodology there are two clear factors: i) we have to identify language problems and needs for learners, ii) we have to make decisions about how we guide learners through input language (listening or reading) and support learners through output language (speaking or writing).
If you look at a content curriculum, it is possible to look from a number of perspectives. 1) As a language teacher, you might look for particular content areas of personal interest to you and your learners. It might be that there is a debate going on in your country about GMOs and so you might decide that you want to explore the Biology curriculum and what it does with the topic of genetics. 2) You can look for particular concepts which you know your learners find particularly difficult and then give it a focus in your language classroom with the express purpose of expanding, clarifying, revising, what they've already done in the content classroom. 3) You might want to focus on the skills that are developed in the content classroom and take them into your language work. I've always been impressed with the survey work I've seen in Science classrooms and am a fan of bringing that into the language classroom. 4) You might find a particular area of language that you want to develop because you know it appears in the content curriculum. One example which springs to mind is 'possessives' and 'apostrophe s' in heredity in Biology.
	Take a look. You might be surprised what you'll find in the content curriculum for your students' school subjects. That is of course assuming that your government has written any curriculum guidelines for you to look at. There is always the textbook if you don't have any guidelines. The UK National Curriculum Website offers lots of ideas: http://curriculum.qca.org.uk/
If you look at Science, for example, you might be directed to the British Biotechnology and Biological research council website. It is a busy site and difficult to find your way around. Look for resources, downloads and then browse what's available. www.bbsrc.ac.uk http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/society/schools/index.html
Argentinian children building their genetic faces.	A wonderful resource you'll find here is a template for making a 'genetic face' and this has children take a blank face, several options of eyes, nose, mouth, hair, eyebrows to cut out and colour and stick on the face and then write out the genetic code that goes with each item on a chart so that they actually have the code for their creation. Brilliant!
The language of heredity is what is given opposite. It is a great context (heredity in Biology I mean) to teach 'possessives and apostrophe s'.
	If you don't know what curriculum area this comes from take a guess, before looking down the page. Any ideas?
Well, it is the same area of heredity and biology. This is an activity I found in the Science Across the World programme many years ago and my students in my English classes are subject to it each year now because it is such a good activity for a class survey. The theory has it that there are 'supertasters', 'medium tasters' and 'low tasters' among us according to the numbers of taste buds we have in a controlled area on our tongue. We can measure this as in the photo. If you turn out to be a low taster like me, you probably love hot, sweet, sour, bitter, spicy food.
	Science Across the World is a very good example of a Science curriculum resource which offers a great deal to language teachers, and it is still free! One of the activities in each topic has students dealing with data of some kind. Do you know who consume the most ice cream in Europe?
Most people say hot countries eat most ice cream, some say countries which produce a lot of milk products, some say countries where they've been on holiday and experienced ice cream. Your students are likely to say some of the above or others. The point here is to deal with facts, question stereotypes and compare what we know or think we know with reality. The language of numbers, comparison, superlatives, drawing conclusions or suppositions is what the data lends itself to perfectly.
	I've done a number of Science Across projects with my students and What do you Eat? is a good topic for most language teachers and learners to cope with. My students created food and drink posters based on their classroom surveys which we exchanged with a school in Vienna, Austria.
Just to finish off the story of heredity in Biology, there are many things we inherit from our parents or our ancestors.
	You can get students into groups where each group has a different piece of data to find from the whole class. Group A deals with hair colour in the class, another Group B deals with who has ear lobes attached to the skin or not attached. Who has hair on their middle finger? Who can roll their tongue? The presentation work is a perfect context for talking about data, making generalizations and others mentioned above.
There is another workshop I do where we investigate the language of the content curriculum. I talked a little bit about the three areas of language in any content lesson.
	A task we did is to underline verb phrases in this Biology text to raise awareness of the roll of parts of sentence other than noun phrases.
It is a good idea to offer learners these other parts of sentences in some form, here a handout of lists of verb phrases, but it could be a poster of phrases on the wall, could be sentence starters with verb phrases in them, or it may be simply the teacher modeling certain phrases, repeating them for the whole class.
	This is an example from my wife's lecture notes from pharmacology. I remember she was studying for an exam and had 20 or so pages of her notes to learn. It was hard work and I offered to help. 'What do you know about pharmacology?' she rightly said. I don't know much at all, but we sat down together and created...
... this tree diagram of the core content of the lecture notes. The interesting thing about this tree is that the cells are all noun phrases and you could annotate the branches with verb phrases or other information and have a ready made resource which would be a diagram of the language of these particular types of medicine.
	Related to this is the cmap website which actually offers visitors a tool for organizing content AND for embedding language along the branches. It's a CLIL tool though they didn't know it!
Another way of using structure is by trying to identify generic diagrammatical structure of linear texts and then using the structure as a guide to reading the text. What would be the structure here?
	It could be something like this, where we have a tree on its side, and five rows of flow diagrams.
You could imagine the table filled in to look like this.
... and you could embed language in the table such as these verb phrases for talking about cause and effect.
	I made my own map of ideas for this presentation which I give here. I think even in contexts where colleagues don't have any role to play in the CLIL of their students, there is still much to pinch from the content curriculum!
The Gibbons book is a great source of more ideas. Back to main conference report
29th Oct, 2009