Big Alex Case has just published some great material for history, moving daringly into CLIL territory. What the Hell is CLIL, I hear you ask? Content and Language Integrated Learning, or CLIL as it’s better known, is basically where a regular classroom subject, such as history, is taught in the target language rather than the first language of the learners. In CLIL classes, tasks are designed to allow students to focus on and learn to use the new language as they learn the new subject content. For example, in a bilingual English/Malaysian school, at a certain age half of the subjects, often including maths and sciences, are taught solely in English. Such policies are becoming more commonplace, as I’ve detailed previously on ELT World News, although not without resistance, especially in the aforementioned case of Malaysia.
In the classroom, CLIL materials can often be characterised as having lots of visual support for ‘meaning’, thus allowing low language level students to access high level content. The materials allow the students to focus on the language they need to learn about that particular subject in English. The choice of language focused on is determined by the demands of the subject. Check out Alex’s stuff here.
2 comments
nicky says:
April 14, 2009 at 9:03 am (UTC 2 )
yeah, i’ve already cut and pasted some of that stuff, not to use in a CLIL class but just because itll be genuinely interesting for some of my students…
ive had some private students (kids in Spanish private school) who studied Science in English in addition–forcing me to become a bit of a Science tutor…seems fairly effective, esp. getting kids to work at discourse level (connectors, showing causality, explaining a step-by-step process etc.), as well as general “thinking skills” practice in L2.
david says:
April 14, 2009 at 11:08 am (UTC 2 )
I think it’s a key issue in engaging students; if they’re interested in a subject learning will naturally occur as they will natyrally be inclined to absorb new information, some of that being the language used to describe it.