Universal Design for Learning and CLIL (1)

  

One of our challenges across the curriculum is to reach students who struggle to understand reading passages in different content areas.  This goal is closely related to UDL Principle 2, which involves offering multiple ways of representation. How can we engage our students into reading if they face texts which are written, by far, at comprehension levels higher than their own? 

There is a considerable number of  tools  which are a must  for students who need them but they are available for all students and can be  beneficial to gain a deeper insight  into a text.    

This post will be the first one of a series on UDL across the curriculum so I intend to write short posts with specific tips to put UDL into practice in effective ways without having to spend long hours preparing your classes. Therefore,  today I will just  list my 3 top tools to facilitate reading in any content area :

 - Rewordify 

This is powerful free software that simplifies difficult English for faster comprehension.  Try the Rewordify Engine , the brain behind this tool.  Students will understand texts much better and build their vocabulary much faster. Teachers will save time and prepare much more engaging lessons. 

 -  Readworks 

 It is driven by cognitive Science and it responds to the practical diversity of your classrooms.  It provides educators with a variety of question sets which range from simple multiple choices to inferential questions that build a deeper understanding of the important elements of a text. Vocabulary is carefully selected and exemplified through  authentic sentence examples.  A feature I like a lot is the inclusion of paired texts, which  arise students' critical thinking skills by  asking them  to draw connections and make comparisons.

Readworks contains many other features, such as audio versions of reading content or lesson plans with guided practice. 

- CommonLit 

CommonLit is a nonprofit education technology organization dedicated to ensuring that all students reach the necessary competences regarding reading, writing, communication, and problem-solving skills.

Would you like to know how to  develop CommonLit's  Google Classroom Integration? The following video will allow you to see how to use it in 8 minutes. 

 

These are my 3 top tools today. I will keep on writing on assisted technology tools  to  make UDL a reality for all students.  In other words, to ensure that all learners can access and participate in meaningful, challenging learning opportunities.

QUILLIONZ: an AI-powered question generator that creates reading activites

Educators are hearing more and more about Artificial Intelligence and its benefits to help us save time and effort. Today, I would like to present an AI-powered question generator that allows you to choose a text from any content area in English and create a set of comprehension questions around it. Its name is Quillionz, created by Harbinger AI, a part of Harbinger Group. Harbinger Group is a global leader in eLearning and software product engineering.

What do you have to do to  stop spending long hours on creating questions on the texts your students need to understand? All you have to do is register and find the text you want to use. I would like to point out that Quillionz works best with content that is structured and factual. At the moment, it does not generate higher-order implicit questions but they state it is part of their roadmap so we should keep an eye on the development of this tool. 

Quillionz is perfect if you are looking for questions that ask your learners to identify and recall specific entities, key words, and phrases, define key terms, and describe key ideas encountered in the content. Quillionz also creates questions that evaluate your learners’ ability to explain causal relationships based on explicitly stated reasoning and cite examples of general ideas expressed in the content.

 Would you like to see how  Quillionz  works? Just follow the tutorial below:

I reckon we need tools like this and I am sure that you will find how to make a personalized use of it that suits your classroom purposes. For instance, why not let students choose texts they are interested in and prepare questions they can ask their peers? 

Working on grammar through extensive reading in Science

Our students are often asked to read for understanding and for pleasure. We encourage them to read in order to enrich their vocabulary but we can also ask them to read a text not only  for the   reasons mentioned above  but also to improve their grammar. 

I would like to share an example based on a Science text. My classroom proposal  is aimed at B1-B2 students depending on your teaching context. You can put  it into practice if you are teaching English or if you are an English teacher  working in coordination with a Science teacher who is developing the CLIL approach. In this case, the activity that focuses on language  would be carried out by the language teacher and the Science teacher would focus on Science concepts. 

The main purpose of this type of activity is to foster students' reflection on the features of Science texts so as to foster understanding. 

You can click here to download the text and you can find the classroom activity below the following  image: 

 A heatwave can fry the brain. Photograph: aryos/Getty Images

Classroom activity:

Today we are going to read a text to learn about a new research carried out by scientists but we are also going to read the same text to discover the grammar of it. Therefore, the first time you read the text, check that you understand the ideas in it by looking up the new words. The second time you read the text, work with your partner and pay attention to language use by answering the questions below:

1)  Find at least two comparative sentences.   Would you say their use is important for the type of text? Why?

2)   The text is written in the present tense and in the past tense but you can find at least   an example of the present perfect tense. Can you underline it and say why the writer uses it?

3)   Can you find any words or phrases that express probability?   Underline them and pay attention to the way they are used in this text. Do you think they are common in scientific texts?

4)  Lines 13-14: what do you notice about the use of the words “increase” and “decrease”? Have you learnt anything about the way they can be used?

5)   Lines 10-12: “not only … accurate”.  Do you understand this sentence? Is it the first time you see a sentence starting with “not only”? How could you paraphrase it and make it more simple for a friend of yours who does not understand it?

6)   A feature of scientific texts is the use of long sentences. Can you find one and divide it into two sentences to increase  understanding ?  

7)   The use of the passive voice is very common in scientific texts. Can you find at least three examples? Why do you think the passive voice is so common in Science?

8) Lines 24-33: look at the way “while” and “meanwhile” are used. Is it a different use from the one you knew?  Do you understand  their meaning in this context?  

 9) Lines 31-33: notice the use of "face" in "buyers are faced with far fewer decisions". Can you make a sentence of your own using "be faced with"?

10) The text says that "women are sick of AC standards being tailored around men". What are you sick of? 

I hope this proposal is useful to make your students improve their grammar and better understand Science texts by reflecting on language features of this type of text. Please, let me know what you think about it. 


Science text taken from : 

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jul/11/heatwave-bad-decision-making-harvard-study

Literature circles to foster reading for understanding and enjoyment

We know that making students read and talk about what they read is not easy. However, it is not impossible. Have you ever tried Literature circles? 

What are literature circles? 

    Literature Circles are small, temporary discussion groups of students who are reading the same piece  of literature.

Would you like to try? I should start by describing the  main features: 

  

•  Students prepare the reading assignment independently before joining their group.  Then, they will  participate in group discussions when they join their classmates. 

•  Each group member will have a specific responsibility (role) during discussion sessions

•   The circles will meet on a regular basis to discuss their reading

•   The teacher is a facilitator, not a group member or instructor

•    Each student reads the story from a given perspective so each member is responsible for one aspect of what a mature reader does naturally

•    A spirit of playfulness, sharing and collaboration pervades the classroom

•  It reaches the broad spectrum of students in a natural way (multiple intelligences and diverse learning styles)

•  Assessment includes teacher’s observation and students' self-assessment

•  When books/stories are finished, groups may prepare a final project / booktrailer/digital poster, etc.  (Depending on the amount of time you have, this final product is not a must since students have already been working on the reading assignment and assessment has taken place too). 

How do you organize students into groups? (Ideally, 5 students in each group)

    There  are different roles that you can choose  for each of the  students in the same  group but I would suggest, at least,  the following: 

•      Group discussion leader

•      Passage performer

•      Connector

•      Vocabulary builder

•      Illustrator

I will try to lay out each of the roles briefly:

Group discussion leader:

•    This student must have a solid grasp of the posible themes and the basic plot of the story

•   He /she opens the discussion with a few open-ended questions concerning the story

•  He/she keeps the conversation moving but is not “the boss”. All students are responsible to speak and to ask follow-up questions

Passage performer:

•   This student is asked to make a very close reading of the text and to look for well-written or key passages in the story

•   He/she will read the passages he /she has chosen to the group members

The connector:

•      • He/she tries to find connections between the text and the real world in which he/she lives. For example, the Connector may make connections between the thoughts, feelings or actions of the characters and his/her family, friends or  classmates.

The word wizard:

•    This student chooses some words that he/she believes are very important in the story.

•  The Word Master is not confined to defining new words, but should be encouraged to look for special uses of common words or analyze why the writer repeats some words.

The illustrator:

     •  This student  responds to the events and themes in the story in a creative way by drawing a picture (diagram, sketch, cartoon…) about it.  He/she will have to ask others what they think it means and after hearing them he  will tell them what it represents to him/her.

If you wish, you can use the templates I have prepared for each of these roles above by clicking here.

(I have added a template for another role: the summarizer. You can find it useful if stories/books  are long and students need to meet on different dates to discuss the whole reading assignment.)

Have you ever used Literature Circles to foster reading?  I would love to know your opinion. 

Fostering reading habits through reading and viewing

This post is aimed at helping teachers to foster reading habits in their classrooms. Do you find it difficult to make your students read pieces of literature? I would like to share my insight into engaging students in literature through combining printed texts and video adaptations of the texts. This ppt includes some practical proposals for the classroom  based  on two short stories and two poems. 

A reading strategy that works in every content area

A crucial factor for the success of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is coordination between language teachers and content teachers. A clear point of contact is, without any doubt, the one related to reading strategies. As I have described in previous entries, there is a great variety of reading strategies but today I would like to share my reflection on a specific strategy which enables students to understand   how the information within a written text is organized and, therefore, increase their comprehension of the text. In order to make the most of this strategy, coordination between language teachers and content teachers is essential.

To develop the text structure strategy, language teachers should start by introducing the idea that texts have organizational patterns called text structures.  Then, students should know why they are going to learn about this so language teachers will proceed to explain that if students identify how the text is structured, they will be able to organize the information in the text in a graphic organizer. This will help them to make connections between the text and visual representations of the text and, therefore, to understand the ideas in the text much better.

How many text types should language teachers focus on in order to facilitate reading in the content areas? Yesterday I developed a CLIL seminar session on this and content teachers agreed that a simple classification including the most common patterns of organization would be enough. My proposal includes the following patterns:

- Cause and effect

- Chronological

- Compare and contrast

- Order of importance

- Problem and solution

- Sequence

- Spatial/descriptive

To develop the text structure strategy, language teachers should:

• Show examples of paragraphs that correspond to each text structure.  You can use this handout I presented yesterday.

• Make students read different texts, and ask them to determine the text structure and organize the information  by using a suitable graphic organizer. We found  this worksheet  really useful. You will find it together with a broad range of reading and writing resources  on  www.ereadingworksheets.com website. 

After the procedure above has been completed, content teachers will be able to ask their  students to read in their content areas and they will experience how this visual learning strategy will improve the reading comprehension of students. What is more, students will also remember and recall this information better because it has been learnt both visually and verbally.

If you are thinking of sharing the proposal above with the staff at your school, the following 5-minute video can be very helpful since it explains how to teach students to identify text structures in any subject:

Additional resources:

-  The RMC Research Corporation's Center on Instruction website offers  a collection of Informational text Structure Templates that language teachers can use to introduce this strategy. You can download these templates from here.

-  Click here for a collection of graphic organizers in Word format.

PISA 2018: an opportunity to develop life skills in our classrooms

Global competence is defined in PISA as ‘the capacity to examine global and intercultural issues, to take multiple perspectives, to engage in open, appropriate and effective interactions with people from different cultures and to act for collective well-being and sustainable development’.”

It is obvious that   global competence is not only developed at school. However,  schools play a crucial role in helping young people to develop global competence and contribute to more inclusive societies. I must say that our multicultural  schools are already paying close attention to intercultural sensitivity and respect but  much more needs to be done to share internationally successful models of education that build bridges across cultural differences. 

For the first time, PISA 2018 includes both assessment and background questionnaires on the Global competence.

The assessment will be based on scenario-based tasks. The tasks simulate activities that teachers can facilitate in the classroom or life situations that 15-year-olds can experience, they draw on different areas of global education (e.g. education for sustainable development, human rights education, intercultural education), have different levels of complexity, and require the activation of one or more cognitive processes.

The background questionnaires completed by students, teachers and school principals gather information about the conditions that may enable or hinder the development of students’ global competence. Students will be asked to report how familiar they are with global issues; how developed their linguistic and communication skills are; and how much they differ in attitudes such as adaptability and respect for people from different cultures. 

You can access the  file " Preparing our youth for an inclusive and sustainable world" here  and  very practical resources and case studies  are supplied by  the platform   Global Dimension.

Apart from welcoming the inclusion of the Global competence in PISA 2018, I would  like to provide teachers with some resources on all competences included in PISA 2018. Click on the links below to access the pdf files with the sample test items:

-  Science competence:  PISA 2015  Released field trial cognitive items 

-  Mathematics  competence:  PISA 2012 Released Mathematics items

-  Reading competence:  PISA Reading Literacy Items

-  Financial Competence:  PISA Financial LIteracy questions and answers

Related to this last competence, Young money platform is a very useful source of free downloadable  resources for those educators who teach topics related to Financial Education. 

Whether your school is participating in PISA 2018 or not, I believe that the resources above are a must if we wish to teach life skills and I am sure they will be very useful for CLIL teachers.

Reading comprehension, PISA and CLIL

PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) measures 15-year-old  students' performance in Mathematics, Reading and Science. Now that  PISA 2018 is approaching,  a lot is being said about the need to improve the   results of the last exams in 2015. 

Today I would like to focus this post on the positive impact of  CLIL programmes on the development of reading comprehension in the mother tongue. The reading skills most benefited from CLIL classrooms  are global comprehension, lexical comprehension, understanding of space-time relationships, integration of extra-textual information and identification of extra-textual relations. 

There is  recent and abundant research carried out in several European countries  on what I have stated above these lines but in this post  I would like to go a bit deeper  into  the main  reasons why CLIL affects the acquisition of reading comprehension in the mother tongue. 

First of all, no one  can deny that there is a clear transfer of strategies between L1 and L2 and vice versa but I need to go beyond that so as to explain  that if CLIL is done well, it helps students to become better readers in their mother tongue too. 

The crucial factor that makes CLIL so powerful comes from the need CLIL teachers have  to make students learn how to use reading strategies consciously and systematically. For instance, students need to know about useful  strategies to learn specific vocabulary because  only by strengthening vocabulary acquisition will students access language and  content. I wrote a previous post on the importance of working  on AWL in all content areas.  

However, direct vocabulary instruction is not enough. Experienced CLIL teachers  tell readers why and when they should use reading  strategies, what strategies to use and how to apply them. The teacher models, or demonstrates, how to apply the strategy, usually by "thinking aloud" while reading the text that the students are using.

Regarding text types, there is no doubt that reading in CLIL provides students with different text types from the ones they use in EFL classes. CLIL teachers have to choose their texts very carefully because they have to take into account the students'  language level, amount of new content, lexical load and text difficulty. Needless to say that CLIL teachers have to be strategic readers so as to teach their students about these strategies. In this sense, teaching training institutions play an essential role to support CLIL teachers with knowledge on  reading strategies and suitable reading texts for content areas.

As a teacher trainer, I try to provide  teachers with  the most useful reading strategies and scaffolding techniques  which will facilitate reading in any content area. It goes beyond the scope of a blog post to mention all of them but the following ones are, in my view, essential:

For the teacher: 

- spend the necessary time on the pre-lesson stage (warm-up the reading process by activating key vocabulary, previous knowledge on the topic, etc)

- work on a piece of the text, step by step, in parts 

- shorten sentences or paraphrase difficult concepts

- add images to facilitate comprehension

- use cooperative  reading techniques (jigsaw reading, unscramble texts...)

- add in sub-headings  that help students to understand the structure of the text

- encourage students to prepare their own questions about the text for other students (student-centred methodology is key to enhance motivation towards reading


For the student:

- predict

- locate key words

- annotate the text

- use on-line visual dictionaries while reading

- infer

- summarize the text by using mind-maps (different types for different text  types and subjects)


- use context clues

- make connections 

- evaluate understanding (What did I learn?)

Let me insist on the fact that  content area teachers are not language teachers so coordination between both is essential thoughout this complex process. The best results take place when language teachers help content teachers by working on the difficult words and connectors that students will find in the specific   texts (pre-lesson stage).

Last but not least, Rome was not built in a day so PISA results will not improve overnight but we are on the right track by strengthening language competence through language integration in the curriculum,  CLIL programmes and  a sound  professional development policy for both pre-and in-service teachers. 

The Jigsaw Technique as a way to facilitate reading in CLIL contexts

The video above describes the cooperative learning technique called "Jigsaw reading" in a very clear way but below these lines you can find my description and reflection on the topic:

Defined broadly, Jigsaw is a grouping strategy in which the members of the class are organized into "jigsaw" groups. The students are then reorganized into "expert" groups containing one member from each jigsaw group. The members of the expert group work together to learn the material or solve the problem, then return to their "jigsaw" groups to share their learning. In this way, the work of the expert groups is quickly disseminated throughout the class, with each person taking responsibility for sharing a piece of the puzzle.

Let me suggest a simple way to carry out this technique: 

           -   Divide the reading text into separate extracts and form student groups. The groups    should be diverse in terms of ability.

    -  Form temporary expert groups in which students are assigned to the same extract. Give students in these expert groups time to discuss the main points of their segment and to rehearse the presentations they will make to their jigsaw group.

  -  Then bring the students into jigsaw groups that are composed of one student from each expert group. Have each student present her or his extract to the group. At the end of the session, you may give a quiz so that students are held accountable for learning all the material.

The teacher's role in the jigsaw is to facilitate learning. When students are in expert groups, the teacher can support students by encouraging them to find ways to put information they learned into their own words, to relate the material to their own lives, and to give examples that help them explain the material to their group. Students should be encouraged to help each other and to make sure everyone in their group understands the material and will be confident presenting it to his or her group.

How can we make use of this strategy in any content areas?. Here you can find an example for a Science class. 

On-line Argia magazine in English

             

Our next seminar session will aim at showing  how newspapers and magazines can be superb tools to help CLIL practitioners develop different curriculum areas. From these lines, I would like to share a new section of Argia magazine which offers a variety of news related to English and the Basque Country in  clear, accurate English. 

Please, add this web site  to the pack of resources I have already shared  with you  and the next time we meet  I will suggest ways of using this new source as well as  many other on-line magazines and newspapers   with our teenage students who are learning different areas through English.