How to Recycle the Language

 I am working with a group of students of grade 6, they have final exams of their first term. I am helping them science and English. In science, I prepared  a quiz on socrative therefore, all my students prepare for the final exams and test their preparation by taking quizzes on socrative. I asked them some questions, multiple choice and some questions about short answers or summarizing processes related to their content. This is the first time I realize  the importance of  CLIL content and language integrated learning.

A few weeks before, I attended at British Council “CLIL Essentials” with Mrs. Roquaya Robins. She explained very nicely what is CLIL? The idea is to teach both the subject and the language, and is captured in the phrase "using language to learn, learning to use language.". CLIL encourages the use of curricula which promote the right interpersonal skills, cultural sensitivity and communication and language abilities which are in demand by today’s employers.

When I finished the  British Council’s CLIL Essentials course, I have no idea how I will change my teaching style. CLIL also insists Cognitive load that is another important factor to consider when selecting materials. Cognitive load – that is you don’t want to blow their brains with too much information. This can be done by choosing a relatively simple content area or by using an area that you have already covered in L1.

Surprisingly CLIL came into my teaching style by itself, before acquiring Knowledge of CLIL I was deliberately avoiding talking about English grammar in other subject classes. But now I know how to embed CLIL in my teaching style.

I was talking about science quiz with my grade 6 students. I started for them Quiz and waiting for their answers on my laptop screen. There was a question “ what is Meiosis? Summarize the process of Meiosis.

And I received answers like this “ chromosomes are copied, two cell division occurs, produce four cell” when I saw answers I told them guys we need to take a quick pause. I  wrote their answers on the board and told them we already took sentence fragment and run-on sentence and how you could fix it, is that correct? They said yes. I told them “I am writing your answers on the board” and  we will discuss, it is a sentence fragment, run-on sentence or a complete sentence.

After that, my students start fixing sentence fragment on the board, without any extra stress on science or language class my classroom turn into the CLIL classroom. When we finished correction of all sentence fragments I instructed them to restart science quiz on the socrative and, this time, I want to see subjective answers without any grammatical mistake.

I learned how to recycle the language, at first, when I took CLIL course it was intimidating to use CLIL. It helps me to learn the process of teaching, I am willing to learn more about CLIL because I learned, it could enable my students' progress more quickly and easily.

By: Aayesha Qureshi