Expansion and Promotion of CLIL Teaching Skills in..
Expansion and Promotion of CLIL Teaching Skills in Europe
Start date: Jun 1, 2016,
End date: May 31, 2018
PROJECT
FINISHED
The Sophie-Charlotte Gymnasium has been one of the first schools in Berlin to offer Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) courses. Since the beginning of the 1990's CLIL – has been imparted in Biology, Geography and Political Sciences by teaching those subjects in English. There are 20 colleagues, teachers and teacher trainees participating in this project. The Berlin CLIL-coordinator, a teacher at our school, is constantly aiming to improve the quality of CLIL in Berlin and Brandenburg. We are convinced that CLIL is important and should be promoted since it enhances the European network by increasing linguistic competences in a European target language, English, moreover it also affects (increases) the academic language skills significantly.In an effort to strengthen the European dimension our school has realized numerous European projects for decades. Thus forming great partnerships with schools in other European countries as a result.Over the past two years we have established a co-operation with our Italian partners by sharing our CLIL experience with them. There are a number of teacher trainers who are part of our staff. Our colleague the CLIL coordinator for Berlin organizes the annual CLIL conference at the Free University as well as advanced CLIL training courses for teachers in Berlin. In addition our school is certified to award the CertiLingua Certificate of excellence to students who meet the requirements, amongst others participate in CLIL-courses.Since CLIL is one of the pillars of our school, thanks to our experienced CLIL-teachers, having done pioneer work in the 1990's it has always been our aim to expand and promote the CLIL-competences of the CLIL-teachers and CLIL-faculty even further.Momentarily, within the realms of quality development at our school a new CLIL-curriculum is being designed. For an effective, systematic, holistic, interdisciplinary CLIL-concept in Europe we need teacher training and exchanges with experts of other European partner schools.The goals of the project are to promote and expand the CLIL-compentences and the use of innovative teaching/learning methods, that fullfil the CLIL-teaching requirments. Furthermore, it is our intention to improve the academic language proficiency and the capacity to convey complex contexts easily in the target language.The group of participating teachers is heterogeneous and is separated in two sections, the older teachers with longterm CLIL-teaching experiences but no CLIL-training and the younger colleagues with little teaching but CLIL-training experience which they received during their teacher-traineeship. As a result all participants have different teacher training needs.Among the planned mobility activities further training will help to promote CLIL-teaching competences. Job shadowing and teaching abroad will provide an exchange of experience at a European level, personally as well as CLIL related, it will intensify the European network making it even more effective.Here an improvement of linguistic and intercultural competences and flexibility is expected due to the contact with teachers and students of different mother tongues and cultures. The influence of the mother tongue on CLIL-teaching is relevant since it determines the proximity or distance to the academic language and the English colloquial language. Planning and execution of the mobility activities will be accompanied by an eTwinning project accessed by all participants and partners in the project. All phases will be mutually coordinated either with the further education institutions or the partner schools. Monitoring will also accompany each phase with various instruments. After each mobility activity the participants will write a report and disseminate their best practice experiences in their lessons, the CLIL faculty, on a regional level, among teachers at symposia and the annual CLIL-conference. The results will also be promoted on the eTwinning platform and disseminated among the partner schools.
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