NEW ACADEMIC YEAR, NEW CHALLENGES AND A MUST-READ

 

After a really different summer break, all of us started work on September 1st. For educators, the COVID-19 Pandemic is a  unique challenge which must be targeted at students' emotional welfare and academic progress.

As a teacher trainer, I am trying to find the best way to provide CLIL  teachers with everything they need for  both their face-to-face classes and remote teaching environment. That is why I have decided to offer specific training sessions at schools  and Meet sessions whenever necessary.

Regarding this blog, I will keep updating it in the hope that you will find it useful for your classroom purposes.

 

 This first post aims at letting you know about a great book which focuses on essential issues for the readers of this blog, i.e., teachers who integrate content and language at Secondary level: "CLIL Essentials for Secondary School Teachers", by Cambridge University Press. Why is it a must-read? I would say that it outlines the driving principles of CLIL from both the content and language teacher’s perspective in an insightful way and it provides over 60 practical strategies for using formative assessment to support CLIL. 

My readers know how many seminar sessions I have spent on developing one of the key ingredients in CLIL:  scaffolding. This is precisely another reason why this book is indeed vital for CLIL practitioners: the book offers an extensive number of techniques for the simultaneous scaffolding of both content and language.  

Last but not least, the core characteristics and elements of academic language are described alongside multiple techniques to help students understand and use this language.

Peeter Mehisto with Y.L.Teresa Ting have written  a book that draws on learning theory and research, and applies their outcomes to practical teaching. My heartfelt congratulations on their superb contribution from these lines. 

The online appendices  are available here.

Welcome aboard this CLIL-ing cruise and remember Roger Crawford's book title: "challenges are inevitable, defeat is optional".