Continuing their series, Rosie Tanner and Liz Dale share another activity from their book, CLIL Activities.
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Outline: Brainstorming in class to generate ideas for writing Level: A2 and above Time: 20–25 minutes Language focus: Various, depending on the topic Language skills: Writing (or speaking) Thinking skills: Remembering, ordering, classifying, thinking creatively Preparation: Prepare a topic, key question or task for writing in advance. Decide how you will group the learners for the brainstorm. You will need a large piece of (poster) paper per group and one marker pen per learner. |
Procedure
1. Learners sit around a table with a large piece of poster paper in the middle.
2. One learner writes the key question or topic in the middle of the sheet of paper.
3. Learners have two to three minutes to write all the responses they can think of, writing first individually and in silence. Encourage them to write everything that comes into their heads, and to write continually: this is important in brainstorming. They can cross out ideas later.
4. Learners discuss everything they have written and link their answers with arrows or lines.
5. Learners discuss how to organise the ideas they have generated and then write their piece together.
Subject examples
- Geography: a letter to a mayor of a town discussing the impact of an event (music festival, the Olympics, parade) on the town
- PE: a poster announcing an athletics competition between local schools
Teaching tip
With brainstorming, it is important that you – and the learners – accept every idea that occurs, however silly it might seem. This produces fruitful ideas.
Tips for cross-curricular cooperation between subject and language teachers
- Before the lesson: The subject teacher informs the language teacher what the writing topic is. The language teacher can help learners look at similar text-types and examine the language that is used to organise the piece of writing. Teachers can also work together on assessment criteria for the piece of writing, discussing the question ‘When is it a good piece of writing?” They can design a rubric to assess the piece of writing (see box 6.7c in Activity 6.7: Jigsaw rubric – assessing speaking for a sample rubric) .
- After the lesson: The language teacher can look at first drafts of the pieces of writing and give some feedback so that learners improve their writing themselves. The language teacher can give a mark for language use and organisation; the subject teacher for the ideas.