Before I started this subject I had heard this “CLIL” thing a lot of times. I had no idea of what it was; I never managed to assimilate the concept. I thought that it was one of these things that I would never have to deal with. Now I know that some crucial aspects in Content and Language Integrated Learning (among a lot more) are that the teacher needs to make him/herself understood by using a wide range of strategies, that he needs to engage students in the session and foster participation (this is closely related to charisma!), and that it is also very important to provide students with input adapted to the level, needs and objectives the lesson. -I could definitely experiment this at first hand during the implementation of our first CLIL class!

 

Some other personal ideas that I have developed during the course are that patience is also essential, both for the teacher and the students. I say so because teachers will probably not be understood by their students in the very beginning of the course, and it will probably take time for students to learn content when they don’t even understand the language they are being spoken to. This can lead to frustration, no matter how good the teacher is. Frustration can be a trigger for students to do greater efforts or just to give up. Hopefully they will be patient and they will decide to go on, and still results will not come overnight. This is a long process that, in the end, will definitely bear to real and beautiful fruit. The teacher, on his/her part needs to do great efforts to encourage students to go on.

 

To succeed in a CLIL class we need an interesting and engaging topic. Once we have it, we need to prepare the materials and to focus on the language items that students will need in order to talk about this topic, not the other way around! This is what makes CLIL and CRLL meaningful, you need language as a tool to talk about things, just as you do in real life. Students realize that they need to resort to specific language items if they want to talk about specific things, and this makes the whole process much more natural. I think that we did a good job in preparing visual materials and introducing vocabulary, but maybe we could have given our students better scaffolding with the specific language items that they needed in order to create their definitions. To bear in mind: provide students with the resources they need to build knowledge and language!

 

Concerning the tasks, I came up with the idea of creating a History class. I thought that it could be an interesting and real topic to talk about La Colònia Vidal. I visited it with 4th of ESO students, and it was a great way to learn how people lived in the XIX century and to see the parts of an Industrial colony. My peers liked the idea. I collaborated in the creation of the task and, since my level of French is good, I was also in charge to do the class. I have to say that we all collaborated in the creation of the project and we got on very well! Girl's power !

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Tània Ruiz Cebrià

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