CLIL Summer School,  Aston University, Birmingham next July (13th-17th July 2020)

Learning through languages

"French teachers from St Jerome Bilingual Primary were privileged to attend the CLIL week long CPD in Montpellier in summer 2022, during the first week of the holidays. It was such an enriching and team building experience for all of us! Not only did we learn about CLIL strategies, including interacting skills, but we also bonded with like-minded passionate linguists from the whole of the UK.

We all have come back into the classroom, with a common sense of purpose, more knowledge and skills, as well as memories to cherish forever.

We are so grateful to ALL, Elapse and LFEE for this life changing opportunity and to all the trainers who looked after us so well!"

Isabelle Jones, ALL Council

Last summer, I had the opportunity to go on a CLIL course in Málaga, 22-29 July 2023. The course was offered exclusively to ALL members, funded by Erasmus+, organised by LFEE and facilitated by a very talented multilingual team consisting of Rocío Salgado Fernandez, Teresa Salgado and Daniel Zappi.

As a secondary teacher of French and Spanish, I was particularly interested in refreshing my knowledge of CLIL as well as having the opportunity to enjoy some Spanish immersion. I also thought this would be a great way to network with colleagues from all over the country and beyond.

CLIL activities can be traditional communicative activities

One of the main benefits of the course is to show participants that it is possible to dip your toes into a CLIL curriculum and develop your confidence in a small way, before (or without) developing the approach extensively. To be successful, all colleagues, parents and pupils also need to be clear about the rationale and benefits of the approach.

Please click here for more information.

Curriculum Integrated Language Teaching - CLIL in practice

Reviewed by Jesús M. Hernández González

Jesús is currently working for his PhD on a CLIL-related theme.

This is a practical and engaging manual that addresses the topic in three main parts: the educational context for CLIL (Curriculum Integrated Language Teaching), current aspects of practice in CLIL and new knowledge and future directions. Drawing on theory and examples of real-life practice, this volume points out the potential of this approach along with the benefits of applying it in a dynamic and ever-changing multicultural society. It conceptualises both  “What is CLIL?” through the use of the 4Cs Framework (content, communication, cognition and culture) and the language triptych (language of, for and through learning) and “How to teach CLIL” through seven pedagogical principles. Contributors’ studies and practical descriptions are guided by these fundamental terms, coined by Do Coyle, throughout the book.

From the start the book provides a panorama of CLIL practice in primary and secondary schools especially in Anglophone contexts. The authors give valuable insights into the potential of CLIL in schools and how this pedagogy is especially relevant in the current situation of languages in the United Kingdom. A range of pathways is provided, addressing accountability issues, intercultural understanding, deeper learning and social inclusion. The contributors and editors - international CLIL experts and researchers - explore different facets of CLIL teaching and the adaptability of the approach, which makes it ideal for different contexts, and provides support in facing the challenges of language learning in schools.

The first part of the book deals with the educational context of CLIL, introduces the basics and presents particular reasons why this approach contributes satisfactorily to language learning /  acquisition in countries where English is the first language. This contrasts the picture  of demotivation in language learning in the UK described by Kim Bower with a view of challenging pupils to learn languages across the curriculum, and to construct knowledge and meaning-making in the process, through the CLIL approach. Coyle reflects on these two aspects while detailing the model of pluriliteracies for deeper learning. The authors state “CLIL is about learning to think in another language” and is therefore an appealing experience  as the language “development occurs in the context of learning meaningful curricular content”. To complement this overview, Philip Hood establishes a rationale for CLIL in Primary schools regarding the particularity of learning languages in KS2 in UK schools.

The second part of the book deals with current aspects of practice in CLIL and presents real examples of CLIL implementation.  Authors look at how CLIL contributes significantly to student learning, as well as an effective tool for motivating students and for broadening language teaching perspectives.  A variety of interesting topics is tackled, such as the importance of transition from Primary to Secondary, the role of senior leaders in CLIL success in schools, the implementation of different CLIL models according to the teachers’ background and the plurilingualism contexts where this programme takes place.

In the final section “New Knowledge and Future Directions”. there is a study conducted by San Isidro and Lasagabaster in a trilingual context, where they deal with a wide range of topics  ranging from curriculum development to lesson planning. Meier highlights with practical examples, how translanguaging is a key feature in supporting peer collaboration, equity, inclusion and social cohesion within content-based learning contexts. Finally, Coyle concludes this part of the book by exploring the potential of the Pluriliteracies approach for deeper learning, describing an ecological growth model which helps learning to be conceptualised and prepares learners to be “pluriliterate global citizens”.

Curriculum Integrated Language Teaching is an extraordinary book for scholars, educators, stakeholders, policy-makers, researchers and teachers. It is a magnificent guide and a valuable resource which supports and gives practitioners flexible and adaptable tools for developing this approach with hands-on examples. It should become a reference manual for the teaching of content and language integrated learning approaches in English-dominant settings.

This is a long-awaited, timely and inspirational book looking at CLIL for Anglophone educational settings and exploring the three main themes of sustainability, pedagogy and social justice. It is a magnificent piece of work presenting a complete overview of how CLIL pedagogy has proved a successful approach for the teaching of languages, especially in English-spoken countries.

Read it, enjoy it and make the most of it!

Curriculum Integrated Language Teaching - CLIL in practice

Gary N. Chambers (Author), Kim Bower (Editor), Do Coyle (Editor), Russel Cross (Editor)

Cambridge University Press, 2020, 264 pp, £85

9781108492812

Learning through Languages UK will connect the existing community of practitioners and informal networks at both school and university level, drawing on their expertise to achieve maximum impact. Our ultimate aim is to develop a golden thread of language learning from primary school through to university.

learningthroughlanguages.org.uk

Learning through Languages UK (a consortium of universities, cultural societies and language lobbyists) aims to increase the uptake in languages and raise achievement levels across all subjects in schools through bilingual education. We draw on shared expertise across educational sectors and public stakeholders in order to coordinate, resource, train, research and disseminate, the implementation of learning subjects such as geography or history through the medium of a foreign language (an approach sometimes known as Content and Language Integrated Learning or CLIL)

Across the UK there are pockets of activity in learning through languages, but these remain fragmented and dependent on individuals, often lacking sustainability.

Learning through Languages UK will connect the existing community of practitioners and informal networks at both school and university level, drawing on their expertise to achieve maximum impact. Our ultimate aim is to develop a golden thread of language learning from primary school through to university.

http://learningthroughlanguages.org.uk/cpd-and-training/

CLIL in the Canary Islands was originally termed "Bilingual Sections" with the piloting of 6 schools in 2004 and has always been a top-down approach. Over the last 15 years, the Regional Education Authority has led the CLIL programme, articulating a series of organisational and management measures which have helped to promote CLIL in the islands, resulting in many schools starting to join the "bilingual sections" with commitment from the Governors and the teaching staff. This top-down approach implied a commitment not only from the education institution, but also from the schools and teachers.

CLIL has been seen in its first stages in the Canary Islands, as an opportunity to improve the Language learning experience (English) of all CLIL pupils, with the increase of at least, one session taught through English. This was an important issue for most regions in Spain as the implementation of CLIL meant increasing the number of hours taught in English without decreasing the hours of other curricular subjects.

The two types of schools which are developing CLIL pedagogy in the Canary Islands are: “CLIL schools” and “PILE school”. The main difference between them is that in “PILE school” content subjects are taught entirely through a foreign language, which means that 40% of the curriculum is taught in a foreign language, while in “CLIL schools” the content subject is partially taught through the foreign language; the percentage of the total curriculum is lower than 30%. Currently there are approximately 390 CLIL schools and 25 PILE schools in the islands.

The CLIL approaches are flexible and quite adaptable for each school context. There are though  two main models for Primary schools; they are not exclusive and can co-exist in the same school.

The first and most popular CLIL model, which is developed in most primary schools, is an interdisciplinary CLIL model. Here the modern foreign language subject (English/French or German) is integrated with subject content, except in Music and Physical Education. This means that the CLIL teacher has just one CLIL lesson plan (and not, for instance, one lesson for English and another one for Science in e.g. English) - a holistic lesson plan. Therefore, CLIL teachers develop the assessment criteria, contents, objectives, for both disciplines (English and Science) 

The importance of this model is that CLIL is designed, planned and implemented as a single learning situation;  the main facet of this model is that learners acquire the knowledge, the skills and the processes of these subjects in a holistic way. Model 1 works in both "PILE schools" and "CLIL schools" indiscriminately .

The second model is also popular and has been extended with the creation of the PILE schools. This model aims at the integration of the content and language inside the subject itself. This model is used mainly with Music and PE and with Science or Art and Design, especially in PILE schools, where the subjects are taught entirely through English. The reason why this model began to develop in many schools was because music and physical education teachers were not adequately qualified to teach a foreign language and therefore they could not assess it. So, for instance in PE, although this content subject is taught through English, the PE teacher cannot develop the content or assessment criteria of the  English language, but only of the PE subject matter. 

The choice of model depends on the context and the characteristics of each individual school.

Translanguaging  involves pupils using multiple languages in the classroom without the teacher needing any specialised linguistic knowledge, and is sometimes involved in CLIL classrooms.

Several articles in this newsletter from Erasmus+  funded School Education Gateway bulletin put the spotlights on this topic and provide practice examples of remarkable projects.

Support School education gateway

2020-09-SEG-Bulletin

Playing CLIL was an EU project where drama and CLIL came together; the project wa completed in 2015 and produced a Toolkit for teachers

Playing clil: Click here

Playing Beyond CLIL is a current EU project. They are focusing on deeper leaning through CLIL using drama and the pluriliteracies approach.

Playing beyond clil

What is CRADLE?   

The CRADLE project team has been working with teachers in primary schools (who are not language specialists) to devise a scheme based on Entrepreneurship.

The project places students´ interest, curiosity and sense of initiative at the centre of the learning process. It focuses on the intentional development of entrepreneurial skills, which at a basic level are life skills and encourage feelings of self-efficacy:

• problem-solving
• personal responsibility
• social responsibility
• curiosity
• communication and cooperation

Learners work and learn in an activity-based learning process inspired by ‘Design Thinking’ with problem-solving and designing solutions in mind.

Learners’ actions and ideas are based on their own creativity and initiative, while the CRADLE process allows teachers to check on their progression, and ensure that the project ends up with a meaningful product or activity.

School example: Neue Schule Athens ran a project on Bees with Grade 3 pupils (8-9 year-olds) in German. Entrepreneurial curricular outcomes:

develop ethical and sustainable thinking concerning the impact of humans on ecosystems with a focus on bees

spot needs and the opportunities to help

develop creative and purposeful ideas and judged them in terms of value and financial feasibility to find the best way to reach the goal of helping bees

work together and implement a plan by mobilizing resources, students, parents and teachers of the school The experience they will gain through that process will make them believe in themselves and will assure them that they can make a difference within their community.

Language outcomes:

learn words and phrases related to bees, to be able to describe their appearance and their behaviour

locate and extract information from a simple text

formulate a title for a presentation

present simple chunks of knowledge in the foreign language by using the new vocabulary taught.

CRADLE has created a blended Training Course, Handbook and Toolbox for ‘generalist’ primary school teachers, structured teaching materials in the form of project plans and modules, practical implementation recommendations for school leaders based on lessons learned from the experience of the pilots.

Ideou design thinking: Click here 

Cradle project: Click here

The Teacher Training Course: Click here

ALL member Dr. Kerstin Zindler is a German teacher at Minster School in Southwell, Nottinghamshire with a longstanding interest in Physical Education, and conducting research into CLIL during her doctorate in education. She recognises that practical activities lend themselves especially well to being presented in the target language because they can be (and need to be) modelled by the teacher, making both the language and the PE content transparent.

Kerstin has contributed lesson plan resources and commentary for the ELAPSE website on the theme of fitness training and offers some insights here.

My philosophy as a languages teacher is to get students to use the language as much as possible, and the way I understand CLIL is that the content has to come first, otherwise it would just be a language lesson in disguise. So I start with my learning aim from a PE perspective and then think about what language students would need to access the content.

For this theme I looked for authentic (not watered down) resources from the actual subject from the target language country and then simplified the language where necessary. I also used standard PE resources for the cool down part of the session (see below). To make the language accessible for students, I pinned key vocabulary on the wall in big letters for use as an optional support throughout the lesson.

It is important that I provide students with plenty of opportunities to use the language actively themselves. Particularly in PE it is tempting to go down the route of teacher-centred lessons - leading the different activities in the target language while demonstrating the drills at the same time. Students will easily access the lesson because of the context and deal with a lot of language receptively, but I think this is missing a trick. To get students to speak the language themselves I have to re-think slightly from the PE point of view and provide structured activities where students use, or adapt and use, the new language.

In planning a CLIL lesson we consider the 4 Cs.
Content: This lesson was within a unit of healthy living and I wanted them to understand the different elements of fitness training.

Communication: This included key vocab for body parts, directions and aerobics steps, and, from a grammatical point of view, use of the imperative.

Cognition: Students had to work out aerobics choreography, and then lead a choreography themselves.

Culture: I used German music for the aerobics activity.

The fitness lesson follows a classic format with warm-up, cardio activities, muscle toning and then a cool-down. Throughout, students work in groups or pairs on numerous occasions, giving me the opportunity to circle the room and listen in to assess informally how they are understanding the content and the language. The cool-down acts as a plenary as well, as students need to put into practice the imperative and key language they have learnt throughout the lesson as they lead through their cool-down stretches.

Our cohort at QKA includes 65% of EAL students (with some individual year groups having up to 75%). We aim to provide the highest quality of education, and to cater for all levels and abilities, have developed a parallel curriculum – our Accelerated Curriculum - aiming to fill any gaps in educational experience and to build confidence with using the English language. This guarantees our students can access the full curriculum with levels of literacy and linguistics that allow them to enjoy a satisfactory and successful education.

Our ambitious model of teaching languages, in the Accelerated Curriculum and in the MFL department, is under constant review, and it was our wish to improve that triggered our participation in the ADiBE project (Addressing Diversity in Bilingual Education). This international project involving university researchers, teachers and learners from the UK, Austria, Italy, Finland, Spain and Germany seeks to meet the necessities of bilingual/plurilingual students working together with experts in the field of Bilingual Education or Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) and English as an Additional Language (EAL).

As a school, we identified History and Geography as the two key subjects to integrate with the target languages taught in both departments, English as an additional language and Spanish as modern language. With the guidance of Do Coyle and Kim Bower, experts in the field in the UK, we developed a unit on Dark Tourism and another on The Triangular Slave Trade following the principles of ADIBE and CLIL. (See Languages Today 37).

The teachers and the subject leaders involved have explored the impact of integrating these two subjects into the curriculum, and four further units have now been developed in each of the three years of KS3 (the Romans, Reformation/ the Gunpowder Plot, Causes of World War I, the French Revolution, World War II, the Holocaust, a Sense of Place, Fantastic Places, Coasts and Oceans, Hazardous Earth, and China). Teachers in our school have found CLIL and the ADIBE project a great opportunity

• to link up learning better across subjects
• to engage students in different topics
• to include activities that embrace pluriliteracies (doing, organising, explaining, justifying and arguing).

The experts in the different fields integrated in this project have noted a positive impact on how they teach their own subject, gained from the expertise, views, materials and styles of activities coming from professionals in other faculties.

Queen Katharine Academy has a clear and strong direction for our curriculum development which includes the integration of content of other faculties and language with strategic and balanced planning under a pluriliteracies approach. We are learning so much from this international project and sharing successful practices, and encourage other teachers to share their expertise across departments to guarantee a high quality and broad curriculum.

Juan Echepares Riera

ESOL/ Accelerated Curriculum Teacher and EAL Research Projects Coordinator at Queen Katharine Academy (QKA) in Peterborough.

Juan has also written an article on QKA’s Erasmus+ project work to support Gypsy-Roma students. See the Zone called Practitioner Focus. 

Judith Woodfield has been a champion of CLIL approaches for many years and is now sharing her resources for free on the Times Educational Supplement website (TES resources for teachers).

Judith says:
"I didn't want all my years of CLIL work to be wasted so I have uploaded resources used for CLIL in the three schools where I taught and implemented it . There are many in French and some in German. There are also video clips of CLIL , a methodology booklet etc. in the cross-curricular and pedagogy section. My shop address on the TES site is judithdwoodfield1"

Please click here for more useful information.

The attached pdfs are resources for a lesson on the letters of Alexandre Jacqueau, a French soldier in WW1, designed for able classes in upper Secondary school or the Sixth Form.

Alexandre Jacqueau lesson

Alexandre Jacqueau - lettres

Alexandre Jacqueau - Graph

Alexandre Jacqueau - Graph 2

EDUCATION THROUGH FOOTBALL

Arsenal Double Club Languages is an innovative award-winning educational programme combining football and language learning. Aiming to inspire and motivate pupils at primary and secondary level, the programme uses Arsenal and football to show pupils that language learning can be achievable, rewarding and, above all, fun!

Arsenol Double Club

ALL members recommend in this area resources they have enjoyed using in lessons using CLIL approaches.

CFPI is an ELAPSE partner. They host a YouTube channel with relevant resources for teachers: Click Here

Click here to view a selection of multi-media resources to support primary language teaching, originally created by CILT, the National Centre for Languages and edited by ALL.

Manchester Metropolitan University informs us:

As part of our Erasmus+ funded Framing CLIL project Manchester Metropolitan University has developed a new App for the simultaneous teaching and learning of mathematics and language and a digital portfolio of additional resources. The digital portfolio is currently available in English with versions in other languages to follow in early 2022.

The app can be downloaded from Google Play or Apple Stores (please email [email protected] for log in codes).

In addition, we are looking volunteers to test the app. Ideally we would like the volunteers to be in-service or pre-service mathematics and languages teachers, or anyone who is interested in content and language integrated learning to explore the app and fill in a short questionnaire about their experience of using it.

Please feel free to direct any questions/queries via email [email protected]

The Languages Company website has a section on Pedagogy: Click here

which says :

'A related topic is that of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), which is the focus of the FLAME project. National guidelines were published in 2009 , and although the context has changed much of the advice and the examples given are still useful.'

 These guidelines are available also here.