Academic language and task analysis for CLIL

  

In our first seminar session,  I will try to give an  overview of how to use language objectives in content-area instruction for  Secondary students.  The session will cover the following topics:

     -  What is academic language?  Why is it a must in any content area?

     -   How can you explicitly teach the academic language that fits your content area?

    -  What are language objectives?

    -  How can we integrate language objectives in our content areas?

        ( We will work on this tool  "Task analysis for production"  provided          by http://www.livebinders.com/ )

    

How and why to write a magazine in any content area

We are starting the month  of May and I know that all of you are very busy developing your assessment tasks  for the end of the course. I would like to highlight that  assessment tasks can take many forms. Some of the most common assessment tasks are exams, tests and essays. Therefore, why not ask our students to include their essays/articles on different topics related to our content areas in a magazine?  In this way, they would profit  from the positive outcomes  of both essay writing and group work:

• Essays help students  to learn academic writing skills, including formulating an argument; presenting evidence; integrating material from sources; and referencing appropriately. Students  will synthesize and evaluate theoretical ideas and concepts and develop their research skills. 
• Group work emphasises collaborative learning, problem-solving and critical evaluation, and is a valuable preparation for the workplace since students  will develop team skills and learn to work with a range of people.

Let me facilitate your work by providing you with everything you need to help students design their own magazine:

•        “How to design and write our own magazine”: this is an article I have written for students so that they can follow these guidelines when they are designing their magazine.

•            A   sample of a magazine on Migrants and refugees.  This magazine was the final product of an e-Twinning Project which won the award 2017 for the category 12-15 year olds. I would like to congratulate  the participants in this  Project for its high quality and its  meaningfulness in our current  society.
•     A sample of a Science magazine  from Science in School, the  European journal for Science teachers. 

•          A couple of ICT tools that can be used to create digital magazines:

     https://www.joomag.com/


       https://madmagz.com/

      The second one is very easy to use and you can follow a simple tutorial here:

  

If you choose the digital format, you will be able to embed the magazines   into the school/class website or blog.

I hope that you will like my proposal and encourage your students to create their own magazine. You will have an opportunity to assess their knowledge of some topics and their writing skills while  they will develop their critical thinking skills  and enjoy a very positive teamwork experience.

THE ROLES OF LANGUAGE IN CLIL

If time allows us, on our session on January 29th  I'd like to spend some time on the roles of language in CLIL which have been very thoroughly studied by Ana Llinares, Tom Morton and Rachel Whittaker in the book "The Roles of Language in CLIL" published by CUP.  

"The Roles of Language in CLIL" provides a theoretically based approach to the  integration of language and content in Primary and Secondary contexts addressed to a range of stakeholders in Content and Language Integrated Learning. Adopting the framework of systemic functional linguistics, this book raises practitioners' awareness of how language functions in CLIL.  Drawing on their wide experience as CLIL educators and researchers, the authors explore data collected in real CLIL classrooms and provide a rich description of how CLIL students' language works and may be expected to develop.

One of the authors of the book, Ana Llinares, is a Senior lecturer in the English Department, Madrid Universidad Autónoma and she will be delivering a talk on this topic on May 15th at Getxolinguae. It is therefore a good idea that we have a look at her work before the conference takes place. 

Supporting speaking and spoken interaction

In CLIL lessons students' talking time should be increased and teacher's talking time reduced but the question is: How can we succeed at doing this? By providing students with a speaking framework that enables them to take part  throughout the lesson. This site offers a good choice of different language patterns students will need to succeed at being effective communicators in the target language.

CALP in the classroom. Academic vocabulary

Enhancing  students’ Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency is a fascinating  task though not an easy one. Although it is supposed that students at  Secondary Education  have been exposed to this type of language for many years, it comes as a surprise that they return written assignments using poor and basic vocabulary. It is time to expand their vocabulary and help them build up appropriate discourse.

This  site will help you to  expand your  students' academic vocabulary using the Academic Word List (AWL). All students need to learn general academic vocabulary, words such as: feature, illustrate, regulate, strategy.  By learning this core academic vocabulary,  they will improve their  comprehension of academic texts. It will also help them to write assignments in an academic style.