READING 4: Planning CLIL lessons

READING 4:  Planning CLIL lessons

By John Clegg

The first important point is that language support is need as well as content teaching on CLIL. When you are teaching a subject in a first language you can count on two things:

a.       Basic language ability: Students have good skills in listening, reading, writing and speaking in their first language. Teaching in a second language (L2) is different, students don’t have the previous fluency with language. They are not fluent, so they need scaffolding, teachers’ help.

b.      Academic language proficiency: Students have cognitive academic language proficiency although it is not always true. Students don’t use to take notes when they are reading or listening, which is very helpful to develop academic skills. Students also need scaffolding to develop this ability.

Learning in L2 can be stressful for students because they are still learning the L2 basics skills and it is difficult for them to use this skills in other subjects. Students learning in L2 are developing their social language skills, so it is hard to manage in other situations.

Because of that, what students need is some support for learning, scaffolding. Teacher has to teach in a different way and should motivate students to learn the subject. So it’s important to use some strategies which are:

•           Recognizing language problems
•           Helping learners by providing support.

Students will have problems with their basic skills learning in L2, so teacher have to predict which problems the students could have.

Teachers’ and student’s skills will be improving gradually while they are practicing CLIL and teachers will have new strategies to provide support for their students.

Strategies samples:

1.       Listening: Use visuals and adapt talking styles. As well as enumerate points, give examples, explain, summarise more than they would in L1.

2.       Speaking: Adjust questions, provide vocabulary, listing key words, sentence starters, tables…

3.       Reading: Check that they understand key vocabulary, provide them with pre-reading questions, and give them a chart to fill.

4.       Writing: Vocabulary list, sentence starters or writing frame.

To sum up, lesson planning in CLIL requires teachers to anticipate language problems and help learners solve them.