The CLIL Teacher

1
The CLIL- Teacher

• non-language subject through the medium of a
  foreign language
• equilibrium between language and content
• balance between medium and message-oriented
  communication

2
Subjects taught through a FL

• Subjects that mainly rely on verbal communication
• History, philosophy, political science
• Reasonable high level of the FL
• Message embedded in a meaningful context

• Subjects in which non-verbal communication is
  used to clarify and integrate content
• PE, biology, geography
• Any level of linguistic competence

3
Verbal and non-verbal input

• Exploring text types (from description to
  argumentation)
• Means to teach students to discuss, give opinions
  and defend positions

• Very basic language taught by realia, visual
  aids, animal and human models
• With linguistically complex descriptions

4
Processing of the input

• adaptation of teacher input to enhance
  comprehension
• balance between language and content
• slightly beyond learner's present linguistic
  competence
• too elaborated
• simplification
• language input - at or just above the proficiency
  of the learner and focus on meaning

5
The CLIL-teacher

• Structured tasks (prediction, glossary, visuals)
• Written work tasks (framework of writing)
• Frequently used structures
• Background knowledge
• Comprehension checks and paraphrasing
• Receptive skills before productive skills (input
  and output)
• Conceptualization (resources and semantic nests)

6
General and special languages

• Human sciences
• Type of discourse closer to the general language
  (read in newspapers, used in conversation, heard
  on TV)
• Improvement of the ability to use the language

• Technical and scientific subjects
• Rich in words found only in the specific field
  and typical grammatical structures (need to be
  learnt)
• Easily recognizable words, transferred from L1

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Similarity

• Degree of similarity
• Related languages
• Non-related languages
• Database on the project web-site

8
Specialized vocabulary

• Acquired depending on the subject matter taught
• History, social sciences, Geography greater
  share of general vocabulary
• Maths, physics, biology specialized vocabulary
  core, basic vocabulary items

9
Lexical knowledge

• Whole words
• How to make up and analyze words in their
  components
• Training on segmentation of unknown words
  (examples)
• Displacement dis- -place- -ment
• (negative prefix root noun suffix)

10
Discoursal or textual competence

• How words are put together to form paragraphs,
  whole texts and coherent speech
• Subcomponents (e.g. ability to use pronouns to
  refer back, predictions about what comes next,
  understanding the conceptual structure of a text)
• Knowledge usually transferred from L1

11
Specific language work

• Analysis of the language of the textbook and
  other teaching materials (awareness of the
  specificity of the subject matter)
• Mastering subject terminology (textbook context,
  enlargement of lexical items in classroom teacher
  talk)
• Focus on lexis (identify typical and recurrent
  words, definitions are important)
• Subject specific exercises (deriving and
  compounding words, tense use, appropriate
  syntactic forms)

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Subject-linked language competences

• Many of the language needs in the lexical field
• Authentic documents contain most of the
  vocabulary needed
• Preparatory work on the document vocabulary
  lists
• Parallel texts treating the same subject
• Personal file of semantic fields

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Communication techniques

• Compensatory strategies
• Approximation
• Circumlocution
• L1 transfer
• Word coinage
• Overcome communication breakdown
• Take up learning strategies more seriously