MORE CLIL COMPONENTS: COMPETENCE AND CULTURE. SCAFFOLDING

Good afternoon!

It’s 4^th of July and yesterday was third day of the CLIL course. Our teacher, Lorenza, explained to us some more ideas about CLIL components: Competence and culture. We were debating a bit with these concepts and spoken about CLIL as a learner’s based experience. We were practising some more ideas to create activities, like Jigsaw a text. This means to divide it into pieces (A, B, C) and then you hand each piece to one student. They have to read their part and then they become “experts” on that topic. They chat later with same text students (AAA, BBB and CCC). Then they have to explain to the others their bit and try to make them understand what it was about (ABC). It’s a good way to make students talk and share experiences.

Then we were talking about the importance of community and inclusion of the cultural dimension on our class. We exposed different opinions about it and told ideas and situations we had in our countries. We all agreed including cultural aspects and have cultural awareness in our CLIC lessons is essential.

After that, we were exposing the different collaborative instruments we all have in our schools regarding the community and other countries/regions. We talked about exchanges, Erasmus projects, importance of parents, families and council and other ways to get more people into the school. The more the school is open to the society, the better.  

Finishing the lesson, we made some activities to explore the competence dimension, how to do it versus theoretical knowledge, and some ideas about self-assessment of the competence, both for students and for teachers. 

After class, I went to La Valletta to visit and it was very nice to see the city, narrow streets with charm. I wanted to visit as well the 3 cities but run out of time, so will try to go during the weekend.

Today’s lesson was 4th of the CLIL course, and focused on Scaffolding techniques and ideas to do it. We were doing a brief review at the beginning about former lessons.

We started with more activities and analysis of the Grammar spots. One quite interesting activity was to get a text and divide it into 2 pieces. Each piece would have hidden words, just the opposite than the other text. Then the students have to work in pairs, reading the part they have. The other student will try to understand and fill the gaps. They change reading every few words as they find the gaps. It's very interactive and good for chatting and reading. They can also help each other at a language level while assimilating the contents of the subject.

The Scaffolding topic was central during today's lesson. How to reinforce the content you are teaching from the language level. So you need to use a lot of activities that support all this new vocabulary. We talked about all these options we have and did some ourselves and later discuss them from a methodological point of view. 

Later we talked about  Internet tools we could use to get materials and ideas. They were as well social platforms to exchange ideas among schools and teachers. Some famous ones are CLIL4u, Wordlink, BiteSize and BBC learning English, but there are a lot more so I will be using a lot of them next term in the classroom. 

http://languages.dk/clil4u/index.html

We finished the lesson watching some CLIL experiences over Europe in video and working on our project regarding the CLIL Lesson planning. We were thinking some scaffolding activities that could suit our project of Bones and Muscles and we were happy to have such a huge variety to choose from. 

Buenas tardes,

Es 4 de Julio y ayer era el tercer día del curso de CLIL. Nuestra profesora, Lorenza, nos explicó algunas ideas más sobre los componentes de CLIL: en este caso la competencia y la cultura. Debatimos un poco sobre estos conceptos y sobre el papel central del estudiante en la metodología CLIL. Hicimos algunas actividades de ejemplo como Jigsaw para un texto. Consiste en dividirlo en trozos, cada trozo se entrega a diferentes estudiantes (A, B, C) Después se van entregando los trozos y cada cual lee el suyo detenidamente. Posteriormente, los estudiantes comentan el texto con los de su mismo trozo (A, A, A) Finalmente, se juntan trozos diferentes y tienen que explicar al resto sobre qué trataba su trozo. Es una actividad muy buena para hablar y compartir experiencias.  

Después hablamos sobre la importancia de la inclusión del aspecto cultural y comunitario en nuestras clases. Expresamos diferentes opiniones al respecto y hablamos de las diferentes situaciones en nuestros países de origen. Todos estuvimos de acuerdo en considerar el aspecto cultural como algo esencial a la hora de desarrollar clases en modo CLIL. También comentamos algunos instrumentos de colaboración entre países y colegios, como el proyecto Erasmus y los intercambios. 

Para acabar la clase hicimos algunas actividades para explorar la dimensión de las competencias. Saber hacer frente al conocimiento teórico, autoevaluación de la competencia, para profesores y alumnos.

Después de clase fui a la Valleta, la capital de Malta, y fui muy bella visita. La ciudad tiene unas vistas geniales, calles estrechas y auténticas y bastante ambiente. También quería visitar las tres ciudades pero se me acabó el tiempo, espero poder hacerlo este fin de semana.