Beginning CLIL

Firstly, I'd like to thank you for reading this blog. It came as an extremely pleasant surprise to me to find I have "followers" (quite what I expected, I don't know - probably that I'd be writing to myself, which would have been a bit of a waste as I already know the story, lol!)

Secondly, my new lesson on potential dividers and control circuits worked really well, woo hoo! I have a small class at present (just 3 students) and they all managed to progress from the potential divider to understanding and explaining circuits to control a heater and a light. M said he thought the circuits were much easier to understand than he was expecting - I'd shown the class a PCB with the circuit on at the beginning and told them they would be explaining to me how they worked. M is naturally cynical and asked why I couldn't just tell them instead. I said that I thought it would help him to better understand the circuit this way, explained (yet again!) the difference between passive and active learning after which he either agreed or was so tired of hearing it, that he stopped moaning and completed the work, so that was quite a result when he claimed it was easy. We even moved onto capacitors and timing circuits, which didn't faze them either.

Anway, enough of the now, for now. I will return to the point where Barbara lent me a book entitled "Uncovering CLIL" by Peeter Mehisto, David Marsh & Maria Jesus Frigols.

I started reading the book with an open mind, not necessarily expecting any great revelations, but prepared to accept advice and hoping for a few new ideas to try. Barbara had seemed enthusiastic about it and that was good enough to persuade me to invest time in the reading. I trust her judgement completely.

The first few pages didn't seem too promising. There was a lot of discussion of the background of CLIL, history, the rise of CLIL, blah, blah.......... but every so often I'd read something that would strike a chord or make me stop and think.

"...CLIL is a tool for the teaching and learning of content and language. The essence of CLIL is integration." Yes, but wasn't that what we were already doing, had been doing all along?

"...CLIL also calls on content teachers to teach some language." We do that as well, surely? But hang on, if I'm honest, how many times have I written a comment on a student's report about their "lack of English" and how it was hindering their learning of Physics? Whilst that may be true, was I using this phrase as a way of shifting some blame for a lack of progress onto the English department? Even a tiny bit? Should I be making more of an effort to help my students to learn the English necessary for an understanding of Physics? I do try to help them, of course and I do go out of my way to point out vocabulary peculiar to Physics, but could I do more?


"In particular, content teachers need to support the learning of those parts of language knowledge that students are missing and that may be preventing them mastering the content"
Hmm, yes, well that sort of confirms what I'd begun to think for myself. Maybe this book really did have a lot to offer me. Certainly, it made me feel uncomfortable. It's not an easy thing to admit you may have made mistakes and are continuing to make them. How much more would I learn that I may not like, about my teaching?

"Content from subjects is used in language-learning classes." That's better - see, it's not just my fault, the bloody English department aren't doing their jobs either! They're not teaching Physics to my class!

I started to enjoy reading the book - not for comments like those above, but because it made me really think about my teaching. That held the promise of improvement, something I genuinely desired. Not that I thought I was doing a bad job, my results have been good after all, but I felt I could improve - I still do - and I wanted to do the best I possibly could for my students. This was an opportunity worth grasping with both hands. I've always enjoyed reflecting on my lessons, trying to decide what I have done well, what I could do better. This book provided a brilliant way to reflect on issues I had not considered before.

After a bright beginning, though, the early chapters in the book became less interesting to me, lots of talk of how CLIL was set up in various schools, how it was used in other countries, that didn't seem to have much to do with Bellerbys. My progress slowed as I became more involved in producing lessons in order to keep up with my September class as they approached the end of their year and exams began to loom on the horizon. Time for reading was very limited as my IWB lesson preparation tended to end late at night. "Uncovering CLIL" became "open the book, read 2 sentences and fall asleep."

Eventually, I didn't even pick up the book before falling asleep. I would need another prompt before continuing with it.