Principles of teaching CLIL, 14 to 19: Reshaping Languages

A successful CLIL lesson should combine elements of the four principles below:

Content - progression in knowledge, skills and understanding related to specific elements of a defined curriculum.
Communication - using language to learn - whilst learning to use language. The key is interaction, NOT reaction.
Cognition - developing thinking skills which link concept formation (abstract and concrete), understanding and language.
Culture - exposure to alternative perspectives and shared understandings, which deepen awareness of otherness and self.

Before embarking on the delivery

Aim to observe your colleague in their subject area. Discuss methodology in your specialist subject familiarising yourself with classroom practice in each subject area.
Share Schemes of Work to give each other an idea of the themes and topics you cover, the more informed you are the better.
Share the NC Levels for each subject area, provide exemplar pieces of work for each other to assess. You may need to alter the order of the Scheme of Work in order to start with a less challenging topic so as to build both pupil and teacher confidence.
Decide on a bank of key transferable phrases and classroom phrases that you will both use to ensure consistency.

Planning

You will need to plan together to be most effective, so set time aside to do this. You need time to ‘thrash’ out ideas and discuss the teaching and learning in detail. When teaching CLIL lessons, plan thoroughly to ensure that the foreign language is accessible and that the content is not ‘watered’ down. Accessing and understanding the content is the main aim of a CLIL lesson. The language is a tool for delivering the content.
Use the most effective teaching and learning styles from each subject area and combine them for a CLIL lesson. This will cater for a variety of learning styles; in addition teachers will develop professionally from working together, transferring the different teaching techniques across the two subjects.
To ensure language acquisition, use a range of activities to suit different learning styles; kinaesthetic, auditory, and visual. Pupils will need to be given sufficient opportunities to practise the language before producing it. However, traditional classroom repetition of newly acquired language may not be appropriate in a content driven lesson.

Teach language learning skills explicitly

Pupils will need to be armed with language learning skills and strategies in order to help them access cognitively challenging content.
In reading, pupils need to be taught to skim and scan texts, looking for words they know, words they can guess as well as cognates. Pupils need to practise reading for gist and extracting key information from a variety of texts. They may need to ‘read’ a photo, a picture, a graph, a timeline.
Again, key listening skills and techniques need to be taught. This might consist of brainstorming vocabulary prior to listening, listening for gist, predicting.
Listening activities in a CLIL lesson are unlikely to consist of listening to a CD, but may consist of a debate in the classroom, activities to classify information, listening combined with kinaesthetic activities, putting events into order, matching images and text.
Writing will be more effective if a staged approach is used, starting with single word based activities, like labelling, checklists, bullet points. Writing frames are an integral part of the success of the early writing that pupils are able to produce. The aim of writing activities will be for pupils to effectively communicate the content they have learnt, demonstrating their understanding. Pupils will undoubtedly make grammatical errors, which will need to be addressed in a language lesson.

Links with target language countries

Email/letter links will not only enhance pupils’ language learning but in addition will enable pupils to use language for a real purpose, to discover and share information related to the content subject (Geography, History etc.) Pupils can compare and contrast factual information, statistics and surveys.
Joint curriculum themed projects around the content subject can be incredibly motivational. Using a theme as the main reason for communication ensures that pupils go beyond the restrictions of communicating about personal information.