As a teacher it can be a challenge to keep up with all of the work you have to do. Deadlines for checking papers, lessons to prepare, students to discuss, parents to meet and so on.You might even find yourself doing something you were not actually supposed to be doing. This…
Curriculum vs Language: what should you focus on?I have written about this topic before. The older blog post is called: Language and subject: a balancing actYesterday I hosted a workshop at a school and one of the teachers mentioned he thought it was challenging to ask his students to learn…
by Mary Spratt and Helen Baker CLIL teachers have often told us how frustrated and concerned they can feel when they try to apply CLIL methodology to their work. Theory is one thing, but applying it is another! How, for example, can you translate the 4C’s or Cummins’ quadrant into a…
Sharing this is both exciting and a little scary..As many of you know, I am no longer a teacher. I have decided to stop teaching and become a fulltime teacher trainer, focusing on CLIL. Obviously I had to come up with activities I thought were interesting for CLIL teachers around the…
What I did to make my lessons work, even onlineJust like every teacher around the globe, I was thrown into the ‘interesting’ world of online CLIL teaching without a lot of time to prepare. And just like you, I struggled at first and to be honest, I still feel online CLIL…
The nr. 1 challenge of CLIL teachers: motivating language outputWhen asked what topic I needed to write an article about in the Facebook CLIL Community, the number one topic was ‘secret student’.Which is not unexpected: motivating CLIL students to produce spoken output is a challenge for many. In this post…
How to practice the skill of active listeningListening is, in my humble opinion, an often neglected language skill compared to the other three. Unless you are a language teacher of course. The reason? Simple: students do not have to ‘be active’ to listen. Yet, active listening is still something that is required of…
Differentiation in your CLIL lesson…balancing the oddsPersonal approaches, individual learning trajectories, student focused tasks.. If you did not know any better you’d think all of these things (with new names every couple of years) are new things to education. Luckily one can find one common theme in all of these approaches:…
CLIL 101: How to start..If you are an expert on CLIL, you can stop reading. This post is not for you, I am sorry. This article is for all of those people who are just starting out with CLIL and have no idea where to start.Estimated time to read this…
The activity I start (almost) every lesson withThe opening of a lesson is just one of many lesson stages, but if not done well can be a problem for the rest of your lesson. A lot of things need to happen at the start: set expectations, activate prior knowledge, engagement so…
A CLIL activity to start a new chapterI already mentioned this specific activity called ‘scanning the chapter’ in my post on the use of word lists, but I wanted to reproach this activity specifically in another way. Everyone learns in a different way, right? Some people need general information, others need examples.…
So much to keep an eye on…Inspired by the enthusiasm during the Crash Course, I thought about how different teachers (worldwide!) work with CLIL. In my opinion, this has everything to do with your current knowledge, experience and skills concerning CLIL. In other words: your level. In this article I explore the…
Word lists: a necessary evil or a great tool?As students encounter new phrases and words they have not heard before, it might be a good idea to motivate the use of word lists. Yet, we do not want students to constantly translate or keep searching for words. In this post I…
Why do we focus on second language only?The publications and books on CLIL always focus on second language acquisition. But one might argue that the CLIL methodology can also be applied to a first language lesson. When this was discussed in the CLIL Community Facebook group, an interesting discussion ensued. In…
What are the criteria for a ‘good’ CLIL teacher?We can all agree on the fact that a CLIL teacher needs to have an acceptable language level to be able to teach in a second language. But does asking for an English qualification of a certain level say anything about the…
Why a student who speaks English fluently still scores low gradesIf you start out with CLIL, your main concern is probably mastering the second language you have to teach in. Soon after though, if you start to learn a little bit more about CLIL, you will hear about BICS and…
Finishing the chapter in a CLIL wayDuring many lessons the structure makes sense: You do a short recap, give an instruction somewhere, students do some work etc. But that is not what you during the final lesson for a test right? At the end of the chapter you simply want to…
A CLIL book full of ideas!The first time I heard of CLIL Activities was during a conversation I had with Rosie Tanner, one of the authors, as she talked about the book with a lot of enthusiasm and energy. I bought the book as soon as it was published, as…
Three steps to develop effective word listsStudents have to practice and learn a second language. To make sure they study new phrases, word lists can be used. However, just ‘using a word list’ is not going to be of much help. Let me share some ideas on how to word lists…
Reflection activities to increase learning awarenessDo you recognize that moment at the end of a lesson: you want to make sure everyone knows what you did by doing reflection activities, but you simply forget the time and the bell tells you you’re too late. Again? With the reflection activities mentioned in this…
When a student does not want to…Student motivation: an interesting topic indeed. Last week a student did not want to do an activity and asked: “why do we have to do this?” I was a bit surprised, I really thought the activity was interesting and useful.. Estimated time to read this…
The development of CLIL over the yearsA lot of people have asked me recently about the “what is CLIL” question and how my definition compares to that of other authors. Phil Ball wrote an excellent article in CLIL Magazine Spring 2016 on the history of CLIL and I thought this would…
Teacher talking time: necessary or overrated?Teachers like talking. A lot. In my experience that does not have to be a bad thing. History teachers can be great story tellers and physics teachers might at their best when they explain what makes their subject so important for real life situations. However, one…
Primary school kids also learn languages and sometimes need some help with their motivation, just like their older counterparts. Fun certainly helps with that, so a couple of students shared their resources with me and I really like the fun games website they showed me! Interested in other ICT tools…
My poor test dummies, I mean, students.. As you are probably aware, I try out new CLIL activities in my lessons every now and then. To be honest, I would to do it more often, but I am not always in the most creative mood. Last week however my creativity…
Guest post by Phil Ball, Part 3 of the “Practical CLIL ideas” series Sequence of activities This sequence of activities looks like nothing special at first, but it was very important to me because it confirmed what I’d always thought about good CLIL practice – that it works best when the…
Do your students talk a lot? Good! CLIL is all about maximizing language output for students. But that is not easily achieved when a teacher explains most of the time, leaving little room for students to actually practice their speaking skills, is it? That is were student speaking time comes…
Why are language expectations important? Guest post by Janet Streeter “Do you know One Direction?” “Have you met Justin Biber?” I was reminded that teenagers are the same the world over. I smiled, said “No, sorry, I’m afraid not” in my best British English and looked hopefully at my colleague…
Pronunciation as a vital element of CLIL A couple of months ago I received a mail asking me about the role of pronunciation in CLIL. Or, to be more specific, phonetics. The write mentioned he could not find any specific content about this topic in relation to CLIL. I have…
Easy to implement CLIL activities in your Mathematics lesson! I posted an article about this topic sometime ago and wanted to share more ideas on activities I regularly use in my lesson. For the record: all of these activities require no preparation time at all and can be used in…
