On 21-22 October I explored the CLIL approach with two very motivated primary school teachers from France. The course aimed to provide both theoretical foundations and practical tools for implementing CLIL in diverse educational contexts.
In today’s globalized world, education increasingly demands that students acquire a deeper knowledge of at least a foreign language, that implies something more that the grammar proficiency. One innovative approach that meets this need is CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning). A CLIL course combines the teaching of subject content, such as history, geography, science, or art, with the learning of an additional language. This dual focus not only enhances students’ linguistic proficiency but also fosters critical thinking, intercultural understanding, and subject mastery.
The primary objectives of the training course were to:
- Develop teachers’ understanding of CLIL principles, methodologies, and underlying theories.
- Equip participants with practical strategies and materials for planning and delivering CLIL lessons.
The course objectives were developed over two days using a highly interactive methodology.
On the first day, the main topic was the meaning of CLIL, its history and the theories that led to its creation, as well as the links to the eight key competences of the European Union. The importance of scaffolding in building meaningful learning was highlighted, including practical examples during the lesson.
The second day of training focused on understanding how to construct a lesson plan, its fundamental parts and how to support learning in practice by following Bloom’s taxonomy and using scaffolding and other useful activities and methodologies. Teachers had the opportunity to observe materials relating to lessons carried out using the CLIL approach and various ready to use lesson plans, from which they could draw inspiration for creating their own lessons.
At the beginning and at the end of the course, brainstorming activities were carried out in order to understand and highlight the progress that teachers had made in their knowledge of CLIL. The teachers themselves were very surprised by the difference in their answers to the same questions. In just two days, they managed to take home new, useful and very important knowledge that they could put into practice immediately.
Author: Vania Mazzei, English teacher and for JUMP, CLIL trainer
