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Citizenship, Learning, managing Information, relating to People and managing Situations (CLIPS) through the medium of French and German – Waingels College
Context
Waingels is a specialist Maths and Computing College which caters for approximately 1500 students in total. Roughly 40% of Key Stage 4 students currently take a modern language at GCSE level.
The adoption of the RSA’s Opening Minds curriculum in the new Year 7 Foundation Year at Waingels College opened an avenue into CLIL.
How the programme is organised
Year 7 have been participating in CLIL lessons since January 2007 as an integral part of the cross-curricular Foundation Year, otherwise known as CLIPS. CLIPS is a competence based programme, which covers five main areas: Citizenship, Learning, managing Information, relating to People and managing Situations. Six classes are taught CLIPS through the medium of French and three further classes through German. The scheme was initiated half way through the academic year on the assumption that students should by then possess the necessary basics in the foreign language to cope with this form of instruction. The scheme is now due to run for the rest of the year for one hour a week. Lessons are co-taught and managed by a teacher of CLIPS alongside a language teacher.
Results/effect
It is too soon to speak of any palpable benefits of CLIL, but achieving higher standards in the students’ language abilities and integrating meaningful content into language lessons constitute central objectives.
The head of MFL, familiar with the practice of CLIL in her former school, now plans to monitor and evaluate the scheme closely as the year progresses.
Future plans
So far it has been decided to teach CLIL in language sets next year rather than in mixed- ability CLIPS groups. This will allow target language and tasks to be differentiated better.
Read more about 100% target language use at Waingels College and watch video clips showing this principle in action in their target language case study.
