Rosie Tanner and Liz Dale, authors of CLIL Activities, are back with the first of two posts on getting the most out of your CLIL training course.
Introduction
Imagine you enter the classroom on the first day of a CLIL summer school in a southern European destination; the sun is shining warmly through the window and you are eager to learn some ideas about CLIL. Your new trainer comes in and says, with a big smile, “The aims of this course are to improve your English and your CLIL skills.” Think for a moment: what would you think the course was about?
Here is what the imaginary CLIL teachers enrolled on the summer school might think. The Colombian geography teacher thinks, “Oh great, I am going to develop CLIL materials!”; the Dutch philosophy teacher imagines, “Great…we are going to learn some theories behind CLIL”; and going through the mind of the Czech biology teacher is, “Oh, I think we are going to learn how to get CLIL students to speak some more.” Why is this? Probably because the aims are fuzzy!
The teacher might also say, “Today, you will go home with at least five new activities for your CLIL classes” or “This morning, you will learn about four important characteristics of good CLIL tasks for writing. You will then each design an effective CLIL writing task for your students.” The teachers will then probably have a similar idea in their heads about what they are going to learn. And it’s the same with your students: the more specific the aims, the better.
Aims: why bother?
But why bother creating aims for your CLIL lessons? Here are several good reasons:
- You can see how far your students have achieved the aims.
- You actually become more aware of what you are doing in the lesson.
- Your students will be aware of what they are learning.
- You sharpen your thinking while preparing your lessons.
- Aims help you decide what you are going to assess.
- Aims help you make choices about which activities to keep or skip if you are running out of time.
Formulating CLIL lesson aims: WALT
A useful way to write aims is to use WALT statements: We Are Learning To… Your aims should answer this question: What can students do by the end of the lesson that they couldn’t do before? For example, we are learning to label a diagram of the human body with at least 10 nouns. Here, your students will be crystal clear about what they are supposed to be able to do and learn by the end of your lesson.
CLIL teachers need to formulate aims in terms of both content and language.
Ideally, CLIL teachers create integrated aims, combining content and language. In the subject pages of our book, CLIL Activities, we have annotated some CLIL materials to support subject teachers in becoming more aware of the language used in a course book. You can also find sample CLIL aims for nine school subjects from A1 to B2 level on the Common European Framework of Reference for languages (CEFR): art, design and technology, economics and business studies; geography; history; ICT; maths; music and drama; physical education; and science. Here is our example for history.
There’s more about language aims in our next blog! A version of this blog was published in article form by Rosie Tanner and Jason Skeet in CLILmagazine.nl Fall 2014, pp 18-19
Make sure to read the second article in Liz’s 2 part series, where she looks at language aims for your CLIL students.