COMMUNICATION SKILLS AND BLOOM'S TAXONOMY

Good morning!

Yesterday’s lesson was related with more aspects of CLIL methodology. Our teacher Lorenza started the class with a brief review of first day lesson. Then she dictated us some paragraphs describing 2 terms: CALP and BICS. BICS stands for Basic Interpersonal Communication skills and CALP stands for Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency. Then we have to argue in pairs about what we were able to catch from the dictate. After groups share with other groups, until the whole class expose the main ideas. Then we copy the definitions on the board. This activity (Dictogloss) was meant to warm up for the new topic: Communication

Then Lorenza brings the Bloom’s taxonomy and we start debate about the different categories of thinking skills: from the “low” ones like remembering, understanding, to the intermediate apply and analyse until the highest evaluate and create. We discuss how they can be useful in our different areas of teaching and how this can help us planning our CLIL lessons in the future.

Later we practice with some keywords related to each category; For example, Remembering: defines, describes, identifies, knows, labels, lists, matches, names, outlines, recalls, recognizes, reproduces, selects, states, …and so on with the other five categories. We continue with Bloom’s taxonomy, but the revision by Anderson and Krathwohl. They give some more details about The Cognitive Process Dimension and the Knowledge dimension.

We finish our class today with some group activities about different topics:

-LOTS (Lower Order Thinking Skills) and HOTS (Higher Order Thinking Skills)

-Marzano’s Taxonomy

-Task designing and Mind Map for our CLIL lesson