edublogs

J'ai commencé mon blog en français

La semaine dernière à l'atelier de ECML BLOGS j'ai commencé mon propre Blog en français. Ceci n'est pas un edublog comme ceci. Non, ca va être plutôt un moyen de communiquer avec des profs et des élèves qui participent à ce projet incroyable qui lie tellement d'écoles partout en Europe, du Royaume-Uni à l'Iselande, de l'Armenie à la Bulgarie (et l'Ireland, bien sur!).

Take a look at the blogs on the ECML Bloggers site. There is an English language weblogs stream and a French stream, depending on what language you wish to communicate on.

Outsiders to the project cannot comment, but if you send me any comments you have I'll put them on. This is to protect the scheme from any attacks, not from cyber squatters but from over-zealous governments in any of the 23 nation states taking part.

It is really interesting to read about what other nations are getting up to in their language courses. Amazing to see how many of the students share the same passions - and the teachers, too.

ELLE Krakow - Presentation on CLIL Followup Part 2

After lunch we continued with our discussions on CLIL, this time with far more debate than before as people saw the problems and big questions that affected their own national situations:

"Funding & Resources
Qualified teachers, materials, local development of materials, money.

1200 teachers have been supported in Germany through Comenius 2, 2c, where teachers are invited to apply for grants towards inservice training: 500 from Primary schools, 200 of whom had presented a desire to learn about CLIL. Priorities are set nationally and funding is provided internationally through groups like the EU, but funding still needs to be sought by individuals a great Austrian CLIL project was spearheaded by one individual teacher. There appears to be a lack of national coordination in recognising potential projects and in following the progress of existing ones.

One representative from Spain put perfectly the argument (in French) that meetings and conferences like the one we are at today are made up with participants who are already the converted: linguists. There are none of the other partners required to make CLIL work, the subject teachers. This is like the SETT Learning festival a few weeks ago: an ICT conference pushing the boundaries to a bunch of practitioners who are already pushing the boundaries.

In Andalucia there is the option of tuition of the foreign language in official language schools which accept young adults to teach them the linguistic skills necessary. The same exists for teachers, both in terms of language skills but also in terms of the pedagogy required to teach language skills. Foreign trips are encouraged, too, but few of these trips are geared up to the goals of CLIL and few of the participants appear to be of a non-linguist background.

The Netherlands are further ahead of the game, with a CLIL network already in existence. They had a conference last week for teachers to hone down their skills, and are setting up a course with a local university to help subject teachers gain better language skills. All subject teachers there have to gain a Cambridge certificate with a two-week trip to England before they can even apply for the CLIL programme.

Lithuania has the support of its Education Minister to gain financing for the training of its subject teachers in foreign language, too.

But there are three issues that stick:

Finance
EU grants remain underused at best, unused at worst. Any growth in the use of these resources generally comes from those who are already connected to the funding networks on offer – the rich getting richer in knowledge terms as well as financial terms?

Time
Who knows a subject teacher who has the time to learn a foreign language to teach their subject? Who knows one who’ll do all that with no recognition given for their efforts (yet)?

Motivation to learn: the language skills gap
Whereas most CLIL projects on the continent appear to use English as the medium, with a large majority of teachers possessing a minimum standard of language ability, potential CLIL projects in English-speaking countries are struck with a knowledge gap. Teachers in Scotland fall into one of three categories: a) they have no knowledge of another language; b) they have limited knowledge of several languages, but no one school has teachers all trained to a reasonable standard in one language; c) they are proficient in language but have not got the requisite expertise in a subject (i.e. they’re language teachers!)

Resources
The answer, I am glad to report, does not rely on paper resources (nor paper resources being “electronified”) being created a great expense and distributed across Europe. The answer is perhaps not in resources but in techniques. Already moves have been made in Germany to provide a toolbox of techniques and strategies for subject teachers. Examples of good practice, though, need to be found, filmed and made available, in much the same way as we are beginning to do on the MFLE. This way we can begin to create a common methodological framework to share across Europe.

The French promote the practice of shadowing – great for the Merry Few who make it onto one of those schemes. What about an internet-based library of videos from classrooms across the continent?

This is where the time ran out, and hopefully more discussion will take place in the coming weeks about developing this with the wide expertise already on show in the Netherlands and in Denmark.

Needless to say, business cards have been exchanged and emails will follow...

ELLE Krakow - Presentation on CLIL

Here is the PowerPoint presentation made by Dr Ana Llinares on CLIL [Content and Languages Inegrated Learning] (right click or Apple click to download):

Download CLIL Presentation for ELLE Krakow Conference.ppt

CLIL: Learning through a foreign language

I'm currently half-way through a session on CLIL, Content and Languages through Integrated Learning (or CBI: Content Based Instruction) where students learn maths, geography, physics, music or whatever through the medium of a foreign language. We had a presentation to start with which threw up too many questions without answers, considering the limited time we had as a group to discuss them all (even more limited with the simultaneous interpreting from French to Polish to English and back).

However, there were some good points from some exciting projects around Europe that I jotted down:

The first point I am not sure about is the definition of CLIL: Integrating content with foreign language, where the content is the commanding curriculum. How can students access the curriculum without an adequate command of the foreign language? A particpant from Slovakia picked up on this. She was responsible for a project where Czech, Slovak, Polish and Hungarians worked together and learned together in an International School, studying in English. She pointed out that we really have to teach language first to be able to work in a content area. This has to come first. Do they have the language of comparison, superlative, analysis and can they write an essay? I would say that the problem with this is that we already do this and the process can take until the end of a university career to get it done to a satisfactory standard.

CLIL has obvious upsides, most of which were evident in the projects represented at the conference. negotiation of meaning, conversational interactions for understanding
Comprehensible input from the teacher, Concentration on “form”, zone of proximal development is reached and more learning occurs. My pet favourite, cooperative learning and individual independent learning can be achieved together, although the speaker ran over the use of ICT far too quickly for my liking: ICT, as a colleague from France pointed out, is the key to making this dual approach to learning possible.

ICT is Key for Comprehensive Learning Approaches
He's a business teacher who ran the WKTO project: 100 virtual classrooms where participants are all from different countries and who hold no common language other than the one(s) they are learning. Brilliant. Language learning is successful because it has an actual use: you can't communicate without it at all, and English use is pointless because no-one in your classroom speaks it.

Individuals still making the difference, but the sum of the parts is not making the whole
There are many challenges to getting CLIL to become a norm that can be applied in any school. Above all is funding. Most subject teachers do not have the foreign language skills necessary to teach that subject in French, German, Spanish, Urdu, Italian, Gaelic even...

Where we miss teachers we make use of bright pupils to help the less linguistically able. Proficient peers help others (but what of their zone of proximal development?).

CLIL is not something I have great knowledge of, but I am seeing so many connections with the able pupils action research. There is something in common here, and quite what I am about to find out in the second half of the debate.