Material & Methodology

[Manuel F. Lara]

I'd like to know what material and methodology are you using at your schools in order to implement CLIL. Are you creating your own material, are you searching for it online or are you getting it from publishing houses?

Are you using any sort of sheltered instruction?

[EUFEMIA ROSSO DELGADO]

I create my own material. I am writing a ebook for each topic and I include links on my ebook. So, really I do both, create and use things that are already done.

[Sharon Keaveney]

In our school we do all of the above! We use text books form British publishers in our priamry English immersion programme in Finland. However we take care to select carefully - sometimes from learning support material and sometimes form younger age group material as well as age appropriate material. We also try to make sure that teachers realise they must "teach" and adapt material when using text books, i.e. not just hand out books and expect the students to work independently without any suppport or language input. There are areas of the curriculum that we do not have text books for such as history, geography and general science. For these teachers tend to search on line and make their own materials. Sometimes this can work well and I have made some useful units of work which combine environmental science topics and reading/language learning strategy instruction. I have also found short radio programmes on appropriate súbjects (usually environmental science) which we have used to practise/ develop listening skills along side content instruction.

At secondary level, most of the material must be made by teachers or found on line. However, I find that students can work with quite advanced texts so long as teachers are supporting the text - using the same text in many ways and encouraging students to then use these texts as a scaffold for their own writing. As an example, a typical group of lessons with 13-14 year olds might involve :

Teacher reading a short story while students listen and underline any unknown vocabulary (e.g Lamb to the Slaughter by Roald Dahl , The Newspaper by O'Henry) - vocabualry lesson

Teacher reading same short story while students look for /underline anything that tells them where or when the story took place and when it might have been written - lesson focused on comprehension

Students working individually/in pairs/small goups on an extension activity related to the story - (describing characters in Lamb to the slaughter - individual work + group discussion, making a list of what happened to the different parts of the newspaper in The Newspaper - small group work) - lesson focused on deepening comprehension and focusing on the langauge skills I wish to develop with the series of lessons (describing characters - vocabulary development etc.)

The final lessons in the series will focus on production and students will have a couple of lessons where guidelines are given and time and support are given in class before students complete the task for homework. For The O'Henry story students have one more lesson listening to a song, "The Table" by The Beautiful South, which describes the events that take place during the life of a table and the various uses it has been put to. Then they must select an everyday object and write its story. For the Roald Dahl story students must work in groups to make an oral presentation of the perfect crime.

Both of the above texts are very challenging for 14 year old students and both texts are quite dated, however the way they are used allows students to develop strategies to help them understand difficult texts and select which vocabulary they should focus on. Further more, using texts of a good standard as input helps ensure that students output is of a good standard.They become familiar with good models of language and can use these models to support their own langauge production.

I think it is really important to use high quality langauge as input at all levels and not oversimplify langauge to ensure understanding, but to offer support and teach strategies to ensure understanding.