Objectives and Assessment in a CLIL Context

Usually, here in Valencia, when we implement a CLIL Program, we based our lessons in the content of the subject, and the knowledge of the language is not a really aim, we use a foreign language sometimes as a language of work, sometimes to learn vocabulary… but teachers don’t teach the language in fact. What I mean, is that maybe we are too focused on achieve the curriculum objectives (and that’s what we assess) that we forget to teach and assess the language competence because it isn’t said literally in the curriculum.

I know that is important to teach the objectives established in the curriculum, but in CLIL, is also important focus on how to learn the foreign language explaining new grammar structures, vocabulary and language for communication and interaction. But, we have to take into account, that the objective of a subject is understand their content, we should avoid too only teaching language per se, forgetting their purpose of the subject. So, for me, the most important thing to teach to my Students in Economy, my subject, is to teach a well-balanced mix of both: content and language learning.

In order to what I’ve said, it seems to me a good model teaching in CLILA[1], which it defines three dimensions:

1.    Subject-specific skills and competences
2.    Subject-specific themes
3.    Communicative competences in the foreign language.

I would like to teach Economy focusing in contents, like understand how the market operates, some important skills as do a good research of information and know how to use it, and communicative competences as show opinions and personals points of view about current issues, teaching the structures that they need to show their opinion, using as support the descriptors of the language level, making it an additional aim apart from the curriculum.

For instance:

Skill: Be assertive showing your point of view.

Content: Market operation

Communicative competence: I can give or seek personal opinions in an informal discussion with friends, agreeing and disagreeing politely.

In that case, use this model is as a matter of fact, an instrument to do the assessment, because the descriptor allow teachers to focus the achievement of the students in the language competence in an integrated way whit the content objective.

I would assess their learning monitoring their learning from the beginning to the end:

1.    Diagnostic Assessment: to know what the student’s level is.
2.    Formative Assessment: to check how students are learning.
3.   Summative Assessment: To add all the contents, skills and communication competences acquired at the end of the course, as addition of the all assessments done during the course.

In my point of view, apart from assess their abilities, contents and language knowledge, is important to assess their behavior and their progression to take into account the inter-personal part of the learning process.

---

[1] Ute Massler, Daniel Stolz &Claudia Queisser (2014) Assessment instruments for promary CLIL.

Scaffolding

"Teaching is not transferring knowledge, is to create the possibilities for its construction."

Scaffolding in Education is related with H.O.T which it means teach in order to build the basis of a perdurable Knowledge.

To achieve that, we have to take into account:

• Context: be natural, be relevant, be active, make sense, allow discovering...
• Connections: connect the knowledge with another areas, knowledges, child's culture...
• Coherence: link everthing they've learnt with a real context.
• Challenge: appropiate balance between linguistic and conginitve challenge. Remember that a new content should be a step more, but not too difficult.
• Curiosity: make them move and learn by their own. We have to create the expectation and curiosity.
• Care: take care for children and treat them individually.
• Community: Children need to feel part of a community (they feel valued and secure).

How can we create a scaffolding lesson? I strongly recommend you to read the article "Scaffolding Strategies to use with your students" where explains that we have to follow this steps to build an unforgettable knowledge:

1. Show and Tell.
2. Tap into prior Knowledge.
3. Give time to talk.
4. Pre-teach vocabulary.
5. Use visual aids.
6. Pause, ask questions, pause, review.

Teaching in H.O.T.

Higher Order Thinking

H.O.T is thinking on a level that is higher than memorize, it means that we have to think in order to learn something, and what is more, we have to use what we have learnt.

H.O.T involves learn something by understanding it (not memorizing, because you can memorize something without understanding it) and thinking for yourself about it.

According to that, we can say that H.O.T is a way of learning that has the following features:

• Does not include memorization.
• Require that we do something with what we learn.
• We must understand the information, connect them, categorize them, manipulate them, put them together in a new way and apply them.
• Is related with Metacognition: To think about your thinking (understand the processes involved in thinking).

It’s very important to teach in a H.O.T way because this helps to scaffold learning, and doing H.O.T questions to the scholars about the content that they study, we achieve to build the basis of a perdurable knowledge.

Higher Order Thinking is more difficult to learn or teach, but is also more valuable because such skills are more likely to be usable in novel situations.

For example, H.O.T is very important when we are teaching in CLIL because we have to teach the 4 skills of a language (listening, speaking, reading and writing) and that concern to promote an active way of learning, because students have to be able to speak and write by themselves, creating new knowledge adapting structures they have learnt before (by reading and listening) to new situations. In English students learn by manipulating information and applying it, memorizing is not effective. 

Classroom Atmosphere

Recently, I read an article about how important is that your classroom tells a story and attract students’ attention and curiosity.

Always is necessary create a good atmosphere at class, but in my opinion is more important when in addition you are going to teach in a foreign language. Learn in another language cause some stress in students, so a relaxed and comfortable environment it’s needed to achieve that students speak and ask questions without fear.

What makes a safe environment it’s a combination between good behaviors (teacher-student, student-student) and classroom decoration.  

You could thing that decoration is important only for pre-scholar, but a good decoration in class always increase visual stimulation, and as a result, they learn without notice it.

For example, you could make posters in your class with the commons polite forms to ask questions, maps abut countries you are talking about, objects related with the topics of the subject (like bills of different countries if you are talking about international trade), curiosities, news, pictures about famous films… And you can also put the names of the objects right next to learn new vocabulary.

All decoration should be done it with a purpose, which is provoke natural conversations around it.

I recommend you to read that article that could give you some ideas about how to decorate your classroom and why:

Click at the picture to go to the article.

Be creative, your students will thank you!

Plurilingualism Teaching

Which is the best linguistic program in Valencia?

At the past post we talked about the society’s change and plurilingualism's importance growth. According to this change, the educational model to teach languages needs to change too in order to build a plurilingual competence, based on the metacognitive skills that different languages learning share and made easy to learn a new one, because they are connected to each other in our mind.

In my opinion, the best model to teach languages, and more here in Valencia where we have two official languages, is the one which try to give the same importance to every language and which aim is that all languages should be:

1. Studied as a Subject.
2. Used as working language to teach the others subjects, that is the basis of the Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL).

Next presentation show the different Programs that we can apply in our schools and its features:

Linguistic Normalization Plan from garfam

From my point of view, the Linguistic Immersion Program is the best one to apply at schools because its target is that students achieve mastery on both official languages, and could introduce English and other languages as working languages too to teach in a CLIL way.

...What do you think about?