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CLIL in the Primary classroom
CLIL in the Primary classroom
Start date: Aug 1, 2014,
End date: Jul 31, 2015
PROJECT
FINISHED
The project has been developed in a bilingual school which has been using a CLIL methodology for quite a few years so far. There is currently an increasing amount of teachers teaching non-linguistic areas through the English language through a CLIL approach and thus, there was a clear need to widen the teachers´ knowledge about this methodology and how to apply it in the classroom situation. Some of the teachers had been using it and teaching for many years, but they had never had the chance to actually do a course in a foreign country and share their experience using this approach with teachers from other countries of the EU.
Therefore, we decided to apply for this project which has mainly revolved around CLIL and has consisted of the mobility of two CLIL teachers plus the project co-ordinator to the UK to do a CLIL course which was specifically aimed at Primary teachers. This course has been extremely useful to fulfil most of the objectives we set at the beginning of the project such as learn new ways of getting to grips with heterogeneous groups when using CLIL, view new ways of boosting up children´s confidence in the CLIL classroom, have the opportunity to get to know different teachers from other countries and build up relationships with their schools for pen friends exchanges as we have already done, etc.
The teachers who have taken part in the project has been selected taking into account their level of proficiency in the FL, level of motivation and entrepreneurship, willingness to share ideas amongst other members of the staff and outside the school, being at the present using CLIL at the school, etc.
The project co-ordinator is a young and enterprising teacher who is always looking for different ways to improve what is currently being done at school and trying to find new ways of innovating and motivating pupils. Because of his high qualifications as a teacher, he currently gives conferences through which he has disseminated the results from this project and shared with hundreds of teachers from all over Spain what he learnt during his course in the UK. The second teacher who took part in the project is the head of the English department and has been teaching for more than 20 years. However, he had never had the chance to have any training outside the Region of Murcia. Therefore, needless to say that this project has been an actual eye-opener not just towards other ways of teaching, but also another culture and country.
The third participant is also a young teacher who joined our school staff this school year. She is very professional and cut-out for her job but had never had the chance to have any actual training on CLIL. That is one of the reasons why we decided that she should take part in the mobilities so that she can exploit all the ideas from the CLIL course with her students and share them with other teachers from other schools.
Throughout the course that the teachers we have mentioned did, teachers have had theoretical lessons on CLIL as well as practical sessions which were aimed at allowing participants to put into practice their existing ideas and share them with other teachers from other countries. Furthermore, there has been some language development practice which has let participants brush up on their existing knowledge of the English language and learn new appealing ways of teaching pupils the foreign language.
On top of that, there have been programmed visits to schools where teachers have had first hand experience witnessing an actual class in the English Educational system and have the chance to discuss with English teachers different ideas to teach different subjects through the English language such as Science or History. At the end of the course, participants have done some "micro-teaching" where they have prepared some CLIL lessons in pairs and given them in front of the other teachers pretending they were students.
As far as dissemination plans are concerned, I would like to highlight that we have carried quite a number of activities so as to branch out the results of this project e.g. participation in a TV programme, two conferences (in Andalusia and Murcia) explaining the different approaches concerning Education and more precisely CLIL we have learned, giving people advice on how to complete the application form these european projects, etc. We have also come up in the regional newspapers and have organised a 30 hours workshop on CLIL where teachers from our own school and others from the area have attended to our school to learn more about CLIL materials development.
Prior to winding up this summary, I would like to shed some light on the great benefits this project has brought about for our school in terms of pedagogy, students´motivation, enhancement of our CLIL methodology and building up relationships.