Table of Contents I. Introduction II. The Project Project Objective 1 Project Objective 2 Project Objective 3 Who we are and how did we do it?
II. The Project Walking Through Europe Studying Art was dedicated to two beneficiaries: Teachers and Students.
Regarding the Teachers, this Project provided CLIL-Methodology Training to teachers of primary and lower secondary schools. There were three main goals in this Project.
Project Objective 1: Raising teachers’ awareness of the importance of Language-Learning in the context of Content-Instruction. If we want our learners to think correct thoughts and formulate accurate understandings, we must provide them “the language to think with”. However “academic language is nobody’s mother tongue” (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977) . It is therefore necessary to explicitly teach academic discourse, the discipline-specific way of using language to talk about discipline-specific concepts. This is the case even if we are teaching young children since they need age-appropriate academic language to understand content in age-appropriate but academically correct ways. Although we should also explicitly teach age-appropriate academic language in the mother tongue, when we are using a foreign language for instruction we automatically realize that students do not have the linguistic resources to comprehend and produce age-appropriate academic discourse regarding content they are learning about. Using a foreign language therefore makes us explicitly aware of the need to “attend to language learning during content instruction”. _
Project Objective 2: Helping teachers become aware that academic discourse cannot be assimilated through passive receptive osmosis but must be made explicit by using tasks that show students how this language “looks” and tasks that prompt students to produce this language through writing and speaking. There is ample anecdotal evidence to show that simply listening to teachers using this type of discourse to explain content is not enough to guarantee that students will learn this academic language. The need to explicitly see and produce such discourse becomes obvious when the language of instruction is a foreign language for the learners: teachers might speak English well, but the children do not. Therefore CLIL teachers increase opportunities for students to see and produce discipline-specific and age-appropriate academic language so to help students learn about content. Project Objective 3: Helping teachers design and develop CLIL learning materials that utilize age-appropriate academic discourse in tasks which students must complete, actively and interactively, so to learn about various concepts regarding Art. The challenge for the teachers was that the English academic language used in the tasks had to be rendered comprehensible to learners whose English competence was not high, at the Common European Framework Reference, CEFR Level A1/A2.