Uzhgorod CLIL School, Ukraine

Uzhgorod CLIL School for Teachers
Lycee no. 3, Uzhgorod, Ukraine
24-28.03.25
After the CLIL Winter School in Lviv, we began talking about a later Spring school inviting yet more colleagues to discover what CLIL can offer to their teaching. This time the invitation went out to upper primary and lower secondary teachers from a range of state and private schools, and a range of subject backgrounds including English, Maths and the Sciences.
We prepared a programme covering basic principles of CLIL and applied these principles in practical activities for the teachers involved. Lastly, after sessions focused on creating resources for implementing CLIL back in their school contexts.
Many thanks to Natalia Liashko (again!) for her meticulous organization, warm hospitality and contributions which kept us on track and having lots of fun! Thanks also to the school for hosting us for the week.

Day 1

After introductions, a gift from Bulgaria for everyone – martenitis for health and success – we began the programme by exploring layers of language in CLIL classes, subject-specific, general academic and peripheral classroom chat.

Gifting martentsi and making wishes!

Colleagues grouped up and began to brainstorm themes and language for the beginnings of a project to work on together throughout the week.
The themes of their projects are: Transcarpathia and Me, Being Online, Dairy and Cheese, Music over Time.
These projects will form the content of a future FACT Journal during our jubilee 25th anniversary year!

Day 2

I touched on investigating ‘structure’ in text and how exploiting generic ‘ideational frameworks’ can help teachers guide their learners through tectual content input.

A full day of activities! 

Here, we tasted Bulgarian lyutenitsa (very popular!) and looked at textwork.
By now the groups have a clear idea of their project topic and began to collect and sequence tasks.
We visited Uzhgorod Castle, an amazing visit with a tour telling us about the many changes in the region of Transcarpathia over the years.

Day 3

Rockets workshop

We moved on to look at non-text media but still exploiting conceptual structures to help guide learners through non-text input.
We designed, built and launched rockets! Natalia, our coordinator, had prizes for the best flight time.
Now colleagues adapted their projects further to incorporate other media with the same principle of using concept structure to help their students process their input content.
We visited Uzhgorod’s musem village, a substantial and beautiful collection of historical buildings arranged in a village layout including the working wooden church built with no nails.

Museum village church

Day 4
Here we considered supporting writing in CLIL and I presented a range of techniques for scaffolding shorter and longer written works in class.
One simple idea is incorporating academic language into word games as a warm up to making use of the language in a later task.

Academic language sorting for writing

We made Bulgarian banitsa and the colleagues had to remember the ingredients and write the recipe (while waiting for the delicious Bulgarian dish to be ready!) Many thanks to Lyceum 3’s kitchen staff for their warm welcome, feeding us such great food and letting us use their kitchen!

We also had a group farewell dinner.

Day 5
We moved to speaking skills in CLIL and again I added a collection of activity types to the already filled toolbox of ideas for the teachers to take home and try out in their teaching.


We surveyed the group’s speed reactions.
We looked at tasks with an 'information gap' for creating discussion.

Doing an info search




Doing an info search

We included survey work, as all the topics lend themselves to carrying out different surveys both at home and in the class, the community and beyond.
We took group photos as memories in the Uzhgorod sunshine

Group photo by the River Uzh

Group photo on the school steps

Warm thanks and safe journey home to all the colleagues. 
Watch this space, there will be a FACT Journal containing the work of this group to share with you in the coming months!
Keith
29.03.25