Blah blah blah SBY

This IGCSE combined science syllabus includes contents related to: Biology, Chemistry and Physics.

The assessment has 3 different parts (papers) and we recommend you to take papers: 1, 3 and 6.

There has been an awful lot of talk about c ontent and language integrated learning (CLIL) over the last few years and a number of well publicised initiatives around the world.  More recently there has been a reversal in policy in Malaysia on CLIL.  Is this the beginning of the end or just teething problems?

The Venus of Willendorf (below) is an icon of prehistoric art. It is housed in the Museum of Natural History in Vienna. One day, a visitor to the museum asks a guide how old it is. The guide replies that it is 25 thousand years and 8 months old. The visitor is surprised and asks the guide how he can be so exact. The guide replies, “Well, it was 25 thousand years old when I started working here and that was 8 months ago.”

This is a variation of the Tyrannosaurus Rex Joke: An activity that was posted a while back.

1. Start by writing The Venus of Willendorf on the board and ask your students if they can tell you what it is and what they know about it.

2. Show a picture. The one on the left was obtained from Wikipedia. There are a couple of others included in the pdf file lesson plan (above).

3. Tell your students that you are going to ask them to draw a picture. Ask everyone to have a pen or pencil and a piece of blank paper ready.

4. Tell everyone to put down their pens (no drawing yet!) and then give the following instructions:

“I want you to draw a picture of a visitor in a museum. He or she is pointing to the Venus of Willendorf and speaking to a guide. The Venus of Willendorf is in a glass case in the foreground of the picture. The visitor and the guide are in the background. The visitor is on the left hand side and the guide is on the right hand side. There are two large speech bubbles: One coming out of the visitor’s mouth and another coming out of the guide’s mouth.”

To strengthen students’ comprehension of the instructions:

• Use gesture. For example point in the air to demonstrate “pointing at the Venus of Willendorf”
• Change your standing position to demonstrate “on the left/right hand side” or “in the foreground/background”
• Demonstrate what a speech bubble is by drawing an imaginary one in the air (coming out your own mouth) with your finger.
• Speak clearly and write any new language on the board
• Repeat the instructions 2 or 3 times.
• Learn the instructions off by heart. Instructions are clearer when they are not being read from a piece of paper.

5. Before your students draw their pictures, ask them to relay the instructions back to you (there is a lot of useful language here). You could even ask them to write them down from memory.

6. Let everyone draw their pictures (one drawing per person). Tell them not to write anything in the speech bubbles at this stage. The drawings don’t have to be masterpieces like the one below.

(Drawing by Mariola)

7. After letting everyone compare their artwork, ask them to suggest what the visitor and the guide are saying to each other. A typical exchange will go like this:

Visitor: My God! Look at the size of those!
Guide: Yes, they all say that.

NB The speech bubbles should still be left blank at this stage.

8. Tell your students that the visitor is asking a question. Elicit a few examples and write them on the board and help with grammar and language as you go. Possibilities:

• Why is it called the ‘Venus of Willendorf’?
• Where does it get its name?
• How long has it been in this museum?
• How did the museum acquire it?
• Did they discover anything else next to it?
• What was it used for?
• What do we know about the people who made it?
• Who made it?
• What does it represent? / What does it mean? / What do you think it meant to the people who made it?
• How much is it worth? / Is it valuable?
• Why does she have such big bosoms? (Inevitable)

9. Draw/write the following on the board:

Use the answers in the cloud to elicit more possible questions that the visitor asks. Add these to the board.

• Q: What is it? (A: A statuette)
• Q: What is it made of? (A: Limestone)
• Q: How was it made? (A: It was carved)
• Q: Where is it kept / displayed / housed? (A: The Museum of Natural History in Vienna)
• Q: Who discovered it? / Who was it discovered by? (A: Josef Szombathy)
• Q: Why is it important? (A: It is an icon of prehistoric art)
• Q: When was it discovered? (A: 1908)
• Q: Where was it discovered? / Where is it from? (A: Near Willendorf, a village in Austria)
• Q: When does it date to? / When does it date from? / How old is it? (A: Sometime between 24,000 and 22,000 BC)

10. Divide your class into two groups: Group A and Group B. Bring everyone’s attention back to the drawings.

11. Tell students that you are going to dictate the captions for the speech bubbles. Dictate the following

• (For A students only – to be written into the visitor’s speech bubble): Can you tell me how old this statuette is?
• (For A students only – to be written into the guide’s speech bubble): Yes, it’s 25 thousand years and 8 months old.
• (For B students only – to be written into the visitor’s speech bubble): How can you be so exact?
• (For B students only – to be written into the guide’s speech bubble): Well, it was 25 thousand years old when I started working here and that was 8 months ago.

12. Put your students’ drawings up on the classroom wall. Make sure that you pair up student A drawings with student B drawings so that the comic strip makes sense.

Follow up

Ask your students to go online and find out the answers to any of the unanswered questions that arose in step 9.

La semana pasada asístí a las  VII Jornadas Naciones de Secciones Bilingües en Cantabria. La verdad es que fueron muy intensas. Ponencias y experiencias de toda España.  Rescato de mis notas algunas frases que me llamaron la atención:

-Hay un reto diferente en el aula plurilingüe…Tenemos que convertir nuestros centros en “Comunidades de Investigación” (Carmen Alario Trigueros).

- Nos construimos como personas desde nuestro lenguaje. Somos lo que es nuestro lenguaje. Y el lenguaje es poder (Pilar Pérez Esteve).

- El profesorado tenemos que ser un modelo de referencia para el alumnado. Si queremos que lean, tenemos que entrar cada día con el libro que estemos leyendo (Fernando Trujillo). ¡Ah! Y nos recomendó “Caín” de José Saramago…

- Se respeta lo que se conoce (Centro extremeño: CEIP Zurbarán).

- La lengua es un entorno de participación social (Centro catalán: CEIP Amistat).

- Hemos avanzado mucho en los últimos años en la educación, pero ¿qué nos frena para avanzar más?…el propio sistema (Emilio García Prieto).

- No tiene sentido que niños de diez, once o doce años desperdicien con las subordinadas adverbiales el tiempo que le deberían dedicar a la escritura y a la lectura” (Francisco Lorenzo Berguillos citando a Salvador Gutiérrez Ordóñez en el discuro de ingreso a la RAE).

Por supuesto, con esto no agoto todas las ponencias…¡perdón por aquellas que no aparecen!.

Y lo que me parecieron mágicas, apoteósicas, geniales, alucinantes, maravillosas, increíbles, educativas, brillantes,….fueron las CLOWNCLUSIONES de unos payasos y payasas vascos que al final de cada jornada nos deleitaron con un resumen de aquellas cosas que más les llamaron a ellos la atención. Desde luego, creo que todas las personas que presenciamos esas conclusiones en tono de humor estaríamos de acuerdo en decir que fueron increíbles. El último día le pregunté al cámara y a la persona encargada de la grabación si también iban a colgarse los vídeos de las clownclusiones. Ellos no lo sabían porque no dependía de ellos sino de la organización de las jornadas. Por eso, pido desde aquí que, por favor, no se olviden de colgar esos vídeos maravillosos que nos hicieron reir y llorar con su visión de la escuela.

Sobre las Jornadas he encontrado resúmenes y comentarios magníficos en dos blogs que menciono a continuación. Uno es el de Fernando Trujillo, que también nos hizo reirnos muchísimo con sus comentarios en una de las ponencias y que tiene un blog que fue resumiendo a la perfección las intervenciones del resto de las personas. También ha creado un grupo en Facebook para todas aquellas personas interesadas en unirse en torno a esta temática de las secciones bilingües.

- Blog de Fernando Trujillo “De Estranjis“:

   Post 1 - Post 2 – Post 3 - Post 4 – Post 5 - Post 6 – Post 7

- Blog de Pilar Torres (CEP Córdoba) Post 1 – Post 2 (se puede ver un vídeo de poco más de un minuto de una de las Clownclusiones)

- Grupo en Facebook “Profesorado de Secciones y Centros Bilingües“

Un abrazo muy fuerte para el resto de las personas de Asturias que acudieron a las Jornadas y con cuya compañía disfruté…Pilar, Isidoro, Elvira y Belén.

posted by Jürgen Kurtz, Karlsruhe University of Education, Germany

At present, more than 800 students study English as a Foreign Language at Karlsruhe University of Education. TEFL is a central part of their final oral and written (state) exams. Our exam candidates usually focus on one particular TEFL topic, for instance CLT, TBI, CBI, CLIL or, more specifically, on skills development in primary or secondary EFL classrooms, teaching grammar and / or vocabulary, textbook analysis and textbook use, current curricular developments and the history of English language teaching in German schools, developing intercultural communicative competence, assessment and testing, the role of the (new) media, to mention just a few.

Prior to the final exams, all students are required to hand in a reading list (consisting of about 3-5 books plus 4-6 papers published in academic journals; no introductory literature). Since our students’ choice of exam topics is often based on the TEFL classes they attended (e.g. teaching grammar in secondary schools), most of them need relatively little further support or guidance. 

However, according to current exam rules and regulations, the final oral (state) exam has to cover more aspects of TEFL than just the specific one students wish to focus on. This is why we provide all of our students (not only our exam candidates) with a general TEFL reading list. Here is the current version of the document that I would like to share with you. Please click here. This is, of course, a context- and culture-sensitive topic. Nevertheless, any comments or suggestions?

I’m going to start from a context that already exists so for those of you who are completely new to this phrase, you won’t be completely lost.

“Birds fly, fish swim, man thinks and learns………… What we need to do, and all we need to do, is bring as much of the world as we can into [their lives]; give children as much help and guidance as they ask for; listen respectfully when they feel like talking; and then get out of the way. We can trust them to do the rest.” – John Holt, How Children Learn.

In applying organic learning in teaching ESL, let’s not focus on every single tiny aspect of John Holt’s unschooling philosophy. Let’s take some parts we can integrate with other parts of what’s going on in ESL and add a dose of what’s our own personal teaching style and philosophy. Here are the parts I’m taking and integrating with other ideas.

Learning in the world instead of in schoolFor an ESL learner, “the world” is a big, scary, intimidating place where rapid speech and figure of speech abound and direct translations misdirects their comprehension while school is a place teaching to exams and teaching nothing about the world these learners are going to step out into. Let’s imagine we could build a bridge from school to the world – in a sort of incubator; a safe environment to learn, make mistakes and gain confidence. So instead of learning in a highly structured exam-oriented environment, whether it is in a public system or a private language center or cram school,they will be in “an incubated world of learning” outside of school. Follow?

Organic Learning is about living joyfully with trust and freedom.

I eventually realized that  young people have so few adults to depend on for some hope, some direction, some insight, some sense of self-worth. How often have we seen students unable to finish what they started due to personal problems or distractions from learning; a loss, a sickness, a financial challenge, an inability to manage stress, inability to co-ordinate themselves, being drowned by a sense of worthlessness and so on.

To learn well, learners need to feel they are in an environment of low stress and high trust and often that feeling of being able to trust the authority, in this case, the language facilitator, spills over to their personal need to ask for help in their lives.  They need to have a sense of freedom to both make mistakes and talk openly with their facilitator and other members of the learning team.

I’m a believer that paid-teaching shouldn’t involve “feel-good teaching and self-esteem nurturing” but if parents and society were doing their job, we could be doing ours a lot more efficiently.  Give me a class of learners who do not suffer varying degrees of PTSD and I will show you accelerated learning of the genuine kind.

Follow their passions, explore their world, live inquisitive lives and think freely.

Question : WHY do you want to learn English?

To have a better life and better prospects in the future.

Question : Why do YOU want to learn English?

So I can talk to anyone and travel around the world, know what other people are talking about, learn their culture, understand how we are the same or different.

Question : Why do you want to LEARN ENGLISH?

I want to think like an educated person. All the information out there is in English and if I can’t understand, I can’t learn. I don’t want to feel like I cannot learn anything or express my ideas freely.

Do any of the above sound like answers a majority of ESL learners would give you? Aren’t they telling you, in simpler terms, that they would like to live to their fullest potential, have opportunities to discover their passion, explore their world, live inquisitive lives and think freely?

The core themes of Organic Learning, are to include CONTENT that would help them achieve all of the above. Like Organic gardening, we start by listening and respecting the way a learner learns, what’s preventing them from learning and how we can provide the soil (environment) rich in resources and nutrients for them to discover learning.  The rest is up to them.

The content evolves from things they need to learn in order to make learning happen in order to acquire the scaffolding to build the sort of knowledge that would enable them to interact, understand and work with others while fulfilling their passions.

You can see the CONTENT involved here as a manifestation of CLIL. An example of content that could arise from interaction : You notice students are not asking questions. You explore the inner world of a learner and what reasons they feel are preventing them from asking questions and how they feel about that. Learners will struggle to first reflect on their own thoughts, then find the words to articulate their feelings. They will turn to a stronger partner and ask for words to be filled, reminding themselves, then trying to put it together, each helping the other. They will use their electronic dictionaries to find that one word, noting it down in their notebook for future use; “This is what I’ve always wanted to say in English and now I know the word… was at the tip of my tongue yet I couldn’t recall. Let me note it here.” Obviously, different groups of learners will come with different sets of knowledge, background and abilities.  And that’s when I integrate Krashens’ input hypothesis and CLIL.

This is not much different from using a textbook based approach because all ESL course books are structured around the 4 worlds of a learner : their inner world (thoughts, feelings, emotions), their immediate world (family, friends, classroom), the world outside (neighborhood, country, current issues, legends, bizarre) and the rest of the world (social issues, ethical issues, marketing, sociology, art, music, …). The only difference between an organic approach and the coursebook approach is that content is developed as the need arises. Even science and history and geography can be taught, if the students are interested in a particular aspect.

I remember a lesson where upper-intermediate students picked a topic to present. Topics ranged from, “Cluetrain Manifesto”, “English or Esperanto”, “Frederick Taylor’s Management System and other HR theories”, “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”. See how diverse the topics can be as long as it’s something interesting and relevant to the students in the preceding discussions. The students are willing to go home and find a way to get the information and present it with visual aids (Powerpoint, hand-drawn chart, photos, illustrations, show & tell, etc)

For elementary or beginner level students, so much learning has happened just because students saw an Atlas or Google maps for the first time. For quite a few students, they discover that Singapore is so tiny compared to Malaysia and that “fei chou” (Africa) is an entire continent and not a country! They finally realize where zebras and giraffes come from (Oh! I thought it was the zoo!) and that the orangutan is native only to Malaysia and the part of Indonesia bordering Malaysia. These learners are aged 14 -17. And we wonder what our schools teach them?

Of course, to be able to wing-it organically requires a teacher to be knowledgeable, articulate, eloquent, creative and passionate about ensuring learning takes place – but as opposed to what? A teacher who is not knowledgeable, inarticulate, clumsy, dim-witted, apathetic about learning?

I am treating all my writings on my blog as exactly what they are – blogs. Blogs for my own thinking out loud and perhaps touching some points and engaging with others. I am not going to defend anything I write regarding teaching and learning as if it was meant to be a postgrad thesis and I hope that’s OK with you. I welcome questions on the subtleties of what I am saying but I cannot give you documented statistics as my classroom was not controlled for and observed by an accredited, neutral professional.

Here’s what I’m saying : I know I’m in a very privileged position to match methods to my philosophies and my style, to have the freedom to design curriculum and judge outcomes, to control for classroom sizes, time, frequency, material, etc etc etc. Every single factor that can be controlled for (except what sort of parents learners have) to maximize my potential and maximize learning, I will put in place and refine myself as I gain more experience and insights.

I’m sure I could be harder on myself but it’s a marathon, not a sprint and I’m doing it the most transparent way I can. I’d be glad to answer any questions or clear any doubts. I’m not saying I’m doing everything perfect but I’d need to have questions in order to know which areas to look at and reflect upon.

RESOURCES FOR CLIL TEACHERS

Materials for Secondary ClIL Teachers

This link has interesting information about CLIL

posted by Jürgen Kurtz, Karlsruhe University of Education, Germany

The International CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) Conference 2010 “In Pursuit of Excellence: Uncovering CLIL Quality by CLIL Practitioners – Evidencing CLIL Quality by CLIL Researchers” will be held September 30 to October 2 at the University of Eichstätt in Germany. For more information, including the call for contributions, see the webpages of the CLIL Consortium.

On Monday September 21, I attended a talk organized by Marina Kollatou, Councillor for English teachers in Karditsa and Trikala. The talk was about CLIL,  that is Content and Language Integrated Learning by Dimitra Behlikoudi, English School Councillor in Pireus. The event was supplemented by a talk on English Language Resources by Ms Markella Karagiorga, ELT Consultant in the American Embassy.

I will write about CLIL today. It is amazing how you can be working in this sector for so many years (17 for me) and have heard so little about a certain section of it. You would think you should know everything by now, but there…. You never know everything about anything and this is the only truth. CLIL is hardly new, it has been going on for years and from what we heard in the talk it is widely used in Spain, Poland and other European countries, as well as North America.

To make this a little more informative for people who happen to get here looking for information on CLIL, I will just say that it is teaching a subject in a language different from the usual one. For example it could be teaching Geography in English in a Greek school. It sounds very interesting, doesn’t it? And if we think of the example of immersion programs such as the ones that happened in Canada, we can understand its significance. Right now in Greece there is very little CLIL going on, if any at all. The only cases of CLIL are the IB schools that exist, schools where teaching is done in a foreign language. I don’t know if there is any research about the results of such education but I’m pretty sure that regarding acquiring the foreign language, students from such schools are much more fluent that students who take three or four hours of foreign language teaching per week.

However, there are some of us who have been doing CLIL without realizing it is called this way. Many eTwinning partnerships involve teaching like this. The eTwinning program we aspire to begin this year involves the teaching of Maths to 5^th graders in at least five different countries. We are not going to be teaching maths completely in English but we are going to employ the common language to communicate our ideas to our partners, our students are going to use English to (virtually) buy and sell products as well as talk about money exchange. So there you have it: partnerships with content, resulting to more motivated students and teachers (hopefully).

I think this is the goal of CLIL, actually: To involve learners in a meaningful way, to engage them in situations where they have to communicate in the target language without thinking about correct use of this language.

The other day at school, a colleague was telling me about a student of his, who arrived in the Greek classroom at 11 years, having attended only German school before. The child was lost in the beginning, but pretty soon he started doing very well especially at subjects such maths and science. He certainly needed extra hours of lessons of Greek but he seemed to benefit greatly from the other subjects as well. So it was a bit like CLIL for him!

So, overall we enjoyed the talk very much, it’s always refreshing to learn new things!

Here are some useful links on CLIL:

CLIL: A lesson framework from BBC

Content and language integrated learning from the european commission

Ms Karagiorga and Ms Behlikoudi

The illustration above was created by a web tool called WORDLE. And here is an article about how you can use it in the classroom.

Recursos en las siguientes páginas ( KS· Historia sglo XIX-XX:

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/history.key3.htm.

http://www.buzzin.net/teacheres/Ihistorylinks.htm

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/websites/11_16/site/history.shtml

Recursos audio http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/history/

Recopilación de sitios web relacionados con el currículo integrado (MEC-British Council) de Ciencias Sociales – Geografía e Historia para 4º de la ESO.

AquiACD_BOOKS_FILMS_WEBSITES_GEO_HIS_ESO4.

Más Info aqui

http://www.principiosdeconomia.org/ACE/materiales.html

Y…

Muy interesante un blog que abarca varias materias de secundaria para educación bilingüe en inglés(Historia y Ciencias
http://bilingles1eso.blogspot.com/

Y…

Interesantísma web con materiales para Primaria y ESO_al final ir hasta abajo.Enhorabuena al equipo de profesores que lo han hecho

http://www.pangea.org/dim/recursosmultimedia/dionisio/

Aquí podéis encontrar todos los cursos ofertados de Octubre 09  a Agosto 2010.

Sobre cómo solicitarlo todas las instrucciones aquí.

http://www.cprtomelloso.net/~linguistica2/?page_id=13

Aquí está el listado actualizado Cursos Clil Comenius Curso 2009-10

Didactic Unit about

CHILDREN’S RIGHTS

Introduction:

To get in touch with the subject matter it is advisable to start activating the previous knowledge of the students with for instance a brainstorming activity about human and children’s rights and obligations.

Activity development:

Step 1. Once the students are engaged with the topic, they have to read the following presentation about “Children’s Rights” and do the questionnaire and the exercises proposed at the end.

Children's Rights

Step 2. Afterwards, they will have to agree on what two of the children’s rights they’re going to make an advert promoting the chosen rights. The aim of this activity is to make a class group presentation –as a ppt. or a poster– about the Children’s Rights with all the adverts.

The students can choose whether they want to make the adverts by hand and then scann them or to make them with the computer using a drawing tool. They will have to post the two adverts to Slideshare and send them to the teacher’s email account.

Step 3. Finally, as homework, they will have to look for information about a country –of  a proposed list– where the children’s rights are not observed and to make a mindmap, either with Mindmeister or FreeMind, summarizing the children’s rights breakdown of the chosen country. They will also have to present their mindmaps in front of their classmates and to explain the situation of the children’s rights on their chosen country.

Step 4. To conclude this didactic unit about “Children’s Rights”, the students will have to write a reflection about what they have learnt doing this unit.

As you can see, with this activity we are promoting ICT and communication competence –both written and oral– and at the same time we are doing an interdisciplinary CLIL activity that aims at developing the interpersonal, social and civic competence of our students.

CLIL – Content and Language

This video is not to be used in class with the students, but it is for the teachers to get to know the CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) methodology and to see an example of how this new approach to the English teaching really promotes and develops the communicative competenece of our students -which is the main aim of the new curriculum.

Besides, CLIL also promotes the interdisciplinarity and the inclusion of the basic competences -another new and important aspect of the new curriculum.

‘CLIL refers to situations where subjects, or parts of subjects, are taught through a foreign language with dual-focussed aims, namely the learning of content, and the simultaneous learning of a foreign language’. (Marsh, 1994)

This approach involves learning subjects such as history, geography or others, through an additional language. It can be very successful in enhancing the learning of languages and other subjects, and developing in the youngsters a positive ‘can do’ attitude towards themselves as language learners. (Marsh, 2000)

The following video is an example of a secondary high-school that is teaching English using the CLIL methodology since the 2000 year course. I did my theacher training there and I could realize that it really works.

As the new curriculum has moved in the direction of developing the communicative competence of our students rather than just focusing in the traditional gramar-centred approach, we have to change our traditional teaching methods and apply and promote new approaches as, for instance, CLIL-based lessons.

In my opinion, it can be a challenging experience both for the students and the teacher. Do you take the challenge?

by 3Ai, ITIS Marconi, Verona, Italy