PLURILITERACIES DEVELOPMENT THROUGH CLIL





    


This project  aims to develop CLIL approaches, which teachers can use in the classroom, with a special focus on providing support for academic literacies in Secondary education. Quoting Oliver Meyer,  Do Coyle , Ana Halbach , Kevin Schuck and Teresa Ting, the project aims at realizing " the full learning potential of CLIL by focusing on (i) a deeper understanding of the role of subject-specific literacies in enabling and enhancing effective (plurilingual) learning; and (ii) the iteration of a working model which will support new classroom practices and promote the development of learners’ pluriliterate repertoire". 

In order to succeed at fulfilling  this ambitious goal, the group will develop a guide for transforming CLIL practice, which  will be later evaluated, adapted and disseminated by practitioners.

The following video by Teresa Ting will let you know what the Graz group Model on Pluriliteracies through CLIL means: 



For a deeper understanding of the model, "A Pluriliteracies Approach to Teaching for Learning" document by OLiver Meyer in cooperation with  Ana Halbach and Do Coyle is a must read.
Inside this document, you will find that there are  five essential principles that have to be taken into account to foster literacies development:
1. Conceptualising learning progression
2. Focusing on the learner
3. Languaging for understanding
4. Realising cultural embeddeness
5. Rethinking scaffolding for learner development


It goes beyond the scope of this post to enter into details for each of the principles above but we will develop them in next seminar sessions. Right now I would like to say that I firmly believe that implementing any content area through a foreign language makes literacy the centre of the learning process so we should be paying some attention to it in our classroom practice. 

For those of you who wish to know how to put the model into practice, a powerful bank of materials  is provided by the  Graz Group on their CLIL section . You can find ready-to-use classroom units  for Chemistry, Geography and History. As the group develops more materials, they will add them to this page.

Finally, it is only fair to thank the Graz Group for the great contribution they are offering to our CLIL practitioners and to wish them all the best in the development and  dissemination of their project.

CLIL THROUGH VIDEO VIEWING

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Happy New Year to you all, seminar members and blog  followers alike. Today I am writing to comment on  some great sites where students can learn about a wide range of content from different areas through video viewing.

I will start by  letting the new seminar members know about www.neok12.com. I wrote a post about it about four years ago so if you hear about this great site for the first time, you can have a glimpse about it here. To sum up, it is very clearly organized and it covers lots of different topics. It includes some interactive games, diagrams and quizzes but you have to pay to access them whereas the videos are for free.

A very nice site where students meet "the crew" formed by four teenagers who teach in a very entertaining way is studyjams.scholastic.com/studyjams. The content areas in this site are Maths and Science. Some of the documents are printable and there are some interactive tests, definitions of key vocabulary items and even some karaoke songs.

If you are looking for well organized content, www.watchknowlearn.org is a good choice. There are categories,  subcategories and an age filter. 

 Johnlocker.com was anonymously created in 2007 with the sole purpose of spreading and promoting knowledge. Johnlocker.com provides the venue for the public to “deposit” videos into its virtual video locker. Most videos on the internet can be automatically copied on Johnlocker by clicking on “Add Video” and pasting the URL. The videos you see on Johnlocker are there because someone thought that the video was good enough to share with others.

If you are interested in searching  for a good documentary and you wish to know about the content in an easy way, www.topdocumentaryfilms.com is a very suitable option. If you want to find the documentaries corresponding to a specific area, click on  documentary list section and you will access the most recent   documentaries in each category. Clicking on the category title you will find the whole list of documentaries. A very positive feature of this site is that it provides you with a description of the content as well as with comments by users.

Finally, I reckon all of you know about video.nationalgeographic.com. The reasons why I am mentioning it are mainly two: on the one hand, I cannot skip this site just because it is known to all of you since it offers really top quality. On the other hand, I would like to encourage you to make use of it in your CLIL contexts because it also includes content which is not necessarily heavy.

Once again, Happy New 2016 and welcome to our first session on January 19th, where we will talk about the topic I have just developed and also about strategies to foster academic writing in CLIL classes.