SPEAKING IN YOUR CLIL CLASSES: Experimenting and reporting results
Hi teachers,
How are you going? Some months ago I shared on my Instagram how my students do experiments and how they report results in our CLIL Science lessons.
Sometimes English and CLIL teachers complain because their students don't speak English in class. From my point of view, the most important issue we should take into account is that we offer students with motivating and meaningful situations, so that they are eager to use language. However, some of our students may not feel confident yet. In my case, my students are 10-11 year-old and they don't have a good command of English yet. Here's when SCAFFOLDING should appear. Thanks to CLIL methodology, we can plan Language for Learning and Language of Learning in advance. This is a great opportunity to make sure our students have the language accessible to them.
It is a good idea to have the structures and vocabulary they will need in a visible place, so that if a student needs to take a look at it, he/she can do it. I usually use the board or the worksheet in which they are doing their predictions and keeping track of the results obtained in the experiments.. Here you can see some examples:
*In this example, students must predict if the bulb lights up when they use different materials (conductor and insulator materials). They have the sentence they should use. The teacher asks: "What do think it happens when you use the paper clip?". In the worksheet they have the scaffolding "The bulb lights up" or "The bulb doesn't light up".
Another way to provide with Scaffolding is to use Substitution tables:
As CLIL Science teachers, we should be busy bees moving around the classroom from group to group encouraging students to use English. Doing this allows us to offer shy students or students who are struggling to use English in small groups.
How do you manage to make your students speak in your English and CLIL classes? I would love to read about your strategies.
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