Thursday, 29th October

As a starter tuning-in activity, Francisco showed us this morning different images depicting famous and also members of his own family. This was his way to introduce David Marsh, who seems to be one of the most important authors in the CLIL world. As bilingual teachers, we all know tht CLIL stands for 'Content and Language Integrated Learning', but Francisco wanted to make sure that we could correctly explain what CLIL is about. For example, are we using a CLIL approach when we teach our content subjects in Spanish? In order to clarify this controversial point, Francisco asks us to discuss in our groups which is the correct definition of CLIL. We must agree on one and write it down. After a long and frutiful discussion, we discovered that CLIL does not exactly mean teaching content in a foreign language, as this would be more likely labelled as an immersion educational programme. CLIL focusses both in teaching language through content and in teaching content through language, so the teacher should take into account both aspects. The key word here is probably 'integrated', meaning that if we want to use CLIL effectively we cannot fail to consider either the content or the language.

By the way, I find quite useful and interesting this particular technique of asking pupils to discuss about the best way to give a certain definition. While teaching philosophy, giving clear definitions and clarifying conceptual differences is a crucial point. Instead of giving the answers to the students the teacher can ask them to find their own definitions by themselves. But I can't help wondering whether this strategy is the best way to teach difficult abstract contents. I mean, isn't it a bit misleading? It may lead our students to get confused and find that they are completely lost! How can we manage to teach complex and massive contents in one single lesson? There is a possible way to sort out the problem, which is the one that Francisco used in our class today. The teacher can give different definitions, which correspond to different answers given by different authors in different moments. Supposedly, the last one should be the most precise, accurate and appropriate. But is this really the case? How do we know that the last definition given in chronological order is really a valid, definitive, final solution? Why should it be? And how can we convince our students, after opening such a can of worms, that this controversy must find an at least temporary end.

There is another point here in which I tend to be quite critical. I' afraid that all these debates and controversies about the exact definition about what CLIL is and what it is not could be regarded as Byzantine discussions. Is this really important for us and our teaching? Shouldn't we focus our attention on what to do rather than on these petty academic problems about definitions?

Anyway, according to the CLIL guru David Marsh, a good definition of CLIL would be the following one: An evolving educational approach to teaching an learning where subjects are taught through the medium of a non-native language. Actually, today we learnt that CLIL began to be used in the early 1990s to describe and design good practices such as those achieved in different educational environments where teaching and learning took place using a foreign language.

But CLIL is not a universally accepted approach to teaching. In order to deal with some of the most ommon criticism about CLIL, Francisco prepared a 'scrambled eggs' activity. He gave us a bunch of words that we were asked to reorganize in order to reconstruct the original sentence to which they belonged. The sentence happened to be a very critical statement about CLIL, something like 'CLIL is not useful because it requires lots of work and effort for the children' or 'CLIL is just for private schools, where they have all the resources they need'. Then we were asked to reflect in pairs and in groups about these statements, just to check if we agreed or disagreed with them. This is a clever way to create a debate about how teachers could manage to sort out the problems that a CLIL approach can produce. This can be used in my own teaching giving my students some controversial statements, hoping that they will find a way to produce suitable arguments for a rebuttal. The point is trying to shift the focus from the teacher to the students, so instead of giving them the correct answers they will hopefully find them by themselves. However, I found that there was a missing part in this lesson. What about the obvious and undeniable drawbacks of CLIL? We didn't talk about that! The teacher just gave us two obviously oversimplified statements that we were supposed to rebutt, but there was not even the shadow of a fair and contrasted debate between two opposing points of view, for and against CLIL. I guess that everybody in this training course must consider that we are all obviously enthusiastic supporters of this particular approach to teaching, regardless of its flaws, problems or possible counterproductive effects.

Francisco also asked us a rather tricky question: Is your personal approach to CLIL in the classroom a good one or a bad one? Perhaps we should make a difference between the idea of integrating content and language in our teaching (which is what CLIL is supposed to be about) and the methodology that we use when trying to put this approach into practice. David Marsh thinks that CLIL should also be about having fun and being happy at school. Actually, he thinks that we can have bad teaching through another language, but we cannot have bad CLIL, as CLIL is composed of good practices. But I am afraid that this statement is based on a poor tautological definition of CLIL!

A surprising piece of information that I learnt from this video is that CLIL teaching in Spain is considered to be among the best ones in Europe. Primary education teachers seem to be doing a particularly brilliant job in Spain. Where is the secret of their success? They communicate with other colleagues and they work in teams, they use games and play a lot in the class, they use active and motivating methodologies, they use a wide variety of different activities so they can adapt the rhythm of the class… But I guess that Francisco considers that the secret of success is never giving up!

During the afternoon we also had the opportunity to reflect on these questions at the beginning of Kathy's session. Kathy thinks that all these new activities and techniques that we are learning can be integrated in our teaching style without the need of getting rid of all that we have been doing so far. Perhaps it is not necessary to fundamentally change everything. She reminds us that we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water! Hopefully we will be able to maintain whatever works and complement it with these new activities and approaches. To be honest, I am not completely sure about this. I guess that the way we teach is conditioned by a general understanding of our task and our goals that works as a broad frame of mind that underpins everything we do. Using these techniques makes sense if your methodology is coherent with a dynamic, student centred approach. How can we make them work without changing the more traditional, vertical, transmissive model? Wouldn't it be a chaotic incoherent mixture of perspectives? Wouldn't it be extremely confusing both for the teacher and the students?