Bulgaria - FACT Journals Issue 23

FACTWorld issue 23 is the result of the week of Aug 30th to Sept 3rd 2021 when a group of 14 Italian primary teachers came to Anglia School in Plovdiv, Bulgaria for a week’s training in ‘Putting CLIL into Practice’.
The week included 5 CLIL themes spread over the 5 days. Monday looked at levels of language: subject specific, general academic, and peripheral classroom language. Tuesday focused on working with texts. Wednesday looked at working with multi-media. Thursday concentrated on writing and Friday – speaking. On each day, the participants were presented with a principled CLIL approach to each of the above areas as well as a wide range of examples from classroom practice at Anglia School.
The afternoons of each day were dedicated to materials writing where the colleagues wrote resources based on the morning input and which would be immediately usable once back in school in the Autumn term.
You will notice that some of the collections are presented in a logical sequenced form representing how they can proceed in a lesson, others are offered as ‘examples of reading activities’ for a given curriculum theme. Both approaches were accepted in this collection.
The broad CLIL ‘Principles’ which the colleagues ‘Put into Practice’ during the week together were:
- There are three levels of language that a teacher may decide to focus on in a lesson. This includes subject-
specific language or language you can’t do without; there is also general academic language which
tends to be less visible and so will need to be made accessible for learning to make use of it themselves;
and there is peripheral language which is the language of the classroom instruction, and the ‘chat’ between
those involved.
- Teachers working on content in a foreign language will need to think about ‘Guiding learners through
Input’ whether this is text input or other forms of media such as slides, posters, videos etc. We focused a
lot of identifying ‘inherent’ conceptual structures to content in order to exploit that structure in materials
and tasks and best help learners process input content.
- Teachers will also want to think about ‘Supporting Output’ where this refers to written production or
spoken production. Here, again, conceptual structures were centre stage to explore with colleagues how
a structure, for example like a river from beginning to end can be exploited to get learners communicating
using embedded language.
What follows is a collection of examples from the course input followed by the resources written by the
teachers. The aim of the collection is to provide other colleagues with a rich collection of primary CLIL
ideas for developing language and learning skills in content.
It was a thoroughly enjoyable experience for me personally, and a pleasure to show a group of visitors
my adopted country and beautiful home town. I look forward to doing it again!
Keith (10.09.21)
keith@anglia-school.info


Download FACTworld Journal Issue 23