austria

A Curriculum for International Education
Vienna Board of Education, Austria
October 14th, 2014

I was invited by the Vienna Board of Education to give a talk as part of their well-known evening lecture series at their lovely HQ in Vienna.
Over 50 people came to the talk, a topic I've been passionate about for many years. It was a privilege to be able to address the question of what successful school programmes look like which teach young people for membership in the world community beyond school.

It's no secret that in some countries in Europe young people have suffered most as a result of the economic crisis recently - no jobs, few immediate prospects. We looked at what schools can do to best equip young people for mobility, employability and growth, three key educational targets for the EU at the moment of writing.



Coincidentally, youth unemployment in Austria is among the lowest in the EU. Quite clearly, something works well for young people in Austria. Austria is also performing well in terms of numbers of foreign languages spoken and in terms of how well Austrians speak English as a foreign language.


Nika Triebe chaired the event and kept discussion moving along, thanks Nika!

Abstract information:

Title: Mr Keith Kelly, Education Consultant
Title of talk: A Curriculum for International Education

Keith Kelly is an education consultant, and teacher and author in the sphere of bilingual and immersive education. Keith is also a teacher trainer having prepared and delivered courses in CLIL and bilingual education all over the world. Keith believes that foreign language learning should start early and he is owner-manager of Anglia School - an immersive private school for very young children in his home town Plovdiv, Bulgaria. 
Keith has been teaching courses in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) in Austria and at the PH Wien since 2009. He is passionate about young people learning professional and academic skills through the medium of English as a foreign language and sees Austria as a leader in this area. Professional skills and foreign language ability are two of a number of very important competences that young people desperately need to be successful in an economically challenging and competitive workplace that is the world today. Keith believes that curricula need to be designed specifically with these key competences in mind and with particular focus on mobility, employability and intercultural communicative skills that enable young people to best achieve their personal, professional and academic goals and ambitions upon graduating school. These young people need ‘A Curriculum for International Education’.
Keith has been an advocate for and activist in building networks for communication between schools around the world and is founder member and coordinator of the Forum for Across the Curriculum Teaching (FACT). He is also a committed team member of Science Across the World. In January 2008, Keith was made a Fellow of IUPAC (The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry) for his contributions to their educational programme. 
 
 

One of the ingredients for success in education for young people in Austria is that the system offers a diversity of options. Arguably at the top of the list of schools are the Technical High Schools (HTLs) where young Austrians learn engineering, electronics, computing, business and many others. The government has also legislated that these schools now teach technical subjects through the medium of English. Imagine that. Young Austrians are learning technical subjects in English as a foreign language. 

Studying the curriculum through foreign languages is only one aspect of a curriculum for an international education. There are many others, for example intercultural communicative competence and young people learning 'soft skills', or being able to negotiate, compromise, empathize and others.

It was a lively talk with a lot of interaction with the audience and questions asked. No, bilingual, and plurlingual education isn't and doesn't have to be elitist. My answer to this question is simply this. It's only an elitist ambition that young people speak several foreign languages where ministries of education lack the imagination and creativity to implement language education effectively. Young people lose out because Min Ed isn't doing its job properly. A glaring case of this is England where governments since 2002 have seemed incapable of deciding what policy should be followed on foreign language learning. Incredibly England in this period made language learning an option for secondary pupils, a fact which still has the hair standing up on the back of my neck. Let's hope they get it right now foreign languages are being taught lower down the age range. 

I mentioned Bulgaria in this talk. Bulgaria is hardly a leading light in terms of education on a global scale, but there are aspects of the system which others could learn from. For example, some secondary schools offer intensive immersion years in a foreign language, and not just English, but also French, German, Spanish and others. The youngsters graduate a year older because of this, but they study 18 hours of language per week for the entire first year of secondary school. Imagine that. Wow. I guess it's more expensive adding a year on to secondary schooling, but if the poorest member of the EU can afford to fund it...

I also talked about the dynamics of classroom practice. What do we have children doing in class? It's only by getting young people to work in groups that we can expect them to develop group-work skills. It's only by getting our youngsters standing up and giving presentations that we can expect them to have these skills when they apply for a job. These are some of the skills that employers say young people lack when they come to them for a job. We need to teach 'soft skills' as an integral part of the curriculum.

I mentioned Science Across the World as a fabulous example of a programme which integrates soft skills with hard skills from the science curriculum. Take a look, it's still freely available at the Association for Science Education (www.scienceacross.org). 

Slides are attached below. 

 

Austrian CLIL Teacher Development Course - 10th Group

Vienna University of Education Oct 7-9 2015

The tenth group of colleagues came to the most recent CLIL training at the University of Education in Vienna. This training is part of an on-going initiative funded by the Austrian Ministry of Education. It follows on from the Austrian government introducing legislation which demands that specialized High Schools (HTLs) in Austria teach curriculum subjects through the medium of English from the 3rd year of High School education. I am ‘taking stock’ so to speak, as it is 5 years since we started and a round ten groups have been through the course. Also, Putting CLIL into Practice is now published and the acknowledgements in the book pay respect to the work of all of the HTL CLIL teachers who have been on the course and tried out and tested the ideas from ‘3D CLIL’.

The training is a series of four three-day meetings at the University of Education in Vienna. Other training institutions around the country are offering a variety of forms of ongoing professional development for practicing teachers. I’ve been contributing to the training for a number of years now and am responsible along with colleague Simon Hibbert for Modules 1 and 2.

We deal with what I like to call the tools, and the nuts and bolts of CLIL. CLIL is presented and discussed in its 3D form. 3D CLIL refers to three lesson dimensions: concepts, procedures and language. Any or all of these variables may demand an increase or a lowering in support for a group of learners depending on ‘where they are at’ at a given time. Within this framework colleagues are subsequently asked to consider 1) Language Awareness, 2) Guiding Input and 3) Supporting Output.

Language Awareness
This explores with colleagues what layers of language there are in any given CLIL lesson. I talk through and describe three layers of language: subject-specific language; general academic language; peripheral language and give plenty of examples for the teachers to work with to develop their sensitivity and skill at identifying these layers of language in their own subjects. The idea being that armed with this knowledge of the levels of language in their subject areas, colleagues can then go on to raise or lower the amount of ‘language support’ their students need.

Guiding Input
Slideshows, animations, videos, images, objects and talks and many others narrated by the teacher or a ‘voice’ recorded into the medium present ‘input challenge’ to students where they may need some ‘guidance’ to understand their way through the audio-visual content presented. Articles, essays, manuals, written instructions, project descriptions and many other written pieces offer learners further text input challenges and the teacher may need to consider ways and means of guiding learners in order to provide them a pathway through the text input content.

Supporting Output
Students are expected to talk and write in their subject lessons in English. The first thing CLIL teachers need to know is what types of spoken and written ‘texts’ are demanded by their subject. Once this is clear, CLIL teachers need then to be able to visualize the content of these ‘texts’ in diagrams, semi-scripts, frameworks and structures which represent the organization of the ideas and thinking in the ‘texts’ and it is with these structures that learners can be supported to produce their subject standard outputs in spoken or written form.

We start the first module with a needs analysis exercise. Here, the colleagues are given a handout with two fields to fill in for themselves and for their students – what the main problems and challenges are for them to learning in English. This is accompanied by a number of guiding questions, which are not intended to be completely answered, but to offer prompts.

Problems and challenges to teaching in English
Challenge – I teach practicals in design. My students are given projects to do and their work is project-led. It’s difficult for me to do CLIL in this context.

Suggestion – The students have to carry out research using specific websites to read on the background to their projects. Prepare ‘research frames’ to help the students ‘transfer the information’ from the site to their research frames and so ‘read and find key information’.
Challenge – texts are too high level English
Suggestions – texts need to be at the right level
- rewrite them
- shorten them
- summarize them
- simplify them
Understand basic readability (i.e., what makes a text difficult to read)
Challenge – Students see CLIL as an extra ‘burden’
Suggestion – Try to motivate students about why their work in CLIL is useful. One way of doing this is to look to the future and consider work prospects, i.e., many companies want English.
Challenge – It’s a real challenge for me to rethink the way I teach.
Suggestion – You are all experts in your subject area. One thing you will need to do is to look not from the perspective of an expert, but consider the interface between your expert knowledge and your students. How will you get your knowledge across? CLIL is about that interface.
 
 The rest of the first and the second day of the programme is focused on ‘guiding input’ skills. The assignment for the first module is simply for colleagues to take one or two ‘activity types’ from the first module and use them in a lesson from their own subject, record how it goes, get some feedback and upload the whole assignment to the University Moodle for colleagues to read and comment on.
The weakest part, if there is one, is that we don’t involve the English language teachers in the course. It’s been something that was officially decided so as not to create a lack of confidence among the subject teachers. In hindsight, it would have been very useful to have them on board from the word ‘go’.

On the other hand, it’s been a successful model for PD (professional development) for a number of reasons.

1) The teachers are teaching. Not meaning to sound glib, but this means that what the teachers receive in terms of PD, they are able to apply to their teaching immediately.
2) There is time for reflection. Meeting every three or four months for 3 days means that the colleagues get to think about what they are doing and alter things as they see fit based on the course input.
3) 30% of the course input is time to be working on assignments. This is a crucial part of the course, and always comes on the last day. The colleagues have had some input, they’ve been asked to consider a focus for lessons in their subject areas. They sit down and they write lessons. The two course leaders are available to sit and talk with the participants. Usually, we get to talk to everyone in the time we have.
4) The wider picture is one where ‘top-down’ the government has said that it wants CLIL to happen. But, it’s also in a context where schools involved have appointed CLIL coordinators to work with participating teachers and give them support. There is a Google Group ‘HTL CLIL’ with over 200 teachers in it at last count from all over Austria. There is a national network of regional coordinators and a website which publicizes and presents news updates on the project.
5) The teachers are simply very open and receptive to the discussion around the ‘changing of teaching’ that CLIL demands of them. It also can have a positive knock-on effect on their mother-tongue teaching too.

We don’t know how long the course will continue, I suspect as long as teachers are asking for it, the Ministry will fund this professional development opportunity. But, the true evidence of the success of the course will be to see structures and mechanisms in place in schools where departments are coordinating input for their own needs. And this is happening already in some schools!!!
 
 

Conference for CEBS network of vocational schools, Austria
22-24th Oct, 2009

I attended a conference run by CEBS which is the Austrian organization and network of vocational schools. The conference was attended by 350 teachers, mainly teachers of French, German, English, Russian and other languages, but there were also content teachers in the audience. I know because I met some of them.

http://www2.cebs.at/index.php?id=24

DER KOMPETENZ ZULIEBE CENTER FUR BERUFSBEZOGENE SPRACHEN

Bad Hofgastein
Picturesque ski, sport and spa town in the Salzburg mountains
Georg picked me up from Salzburg railway station and we struggled to communicate in German. Those of you know me, know that beyond travel, food, accommodation and so on, my German doesn’t stretch to much conversation. But we discovered we both had French and I learned a lot about the region from Georg on the road from Salzburg to Bad Hofgastein in the Salzburg mountains. Many thanks Georg.

http://www.gastein.com/en-gastein-bad_hofgastein.htm

Franz Mittendorfer invited me to the event with this team in place and with the idea that CLIL may be able to offer something to vocational schools teaching their subjects through foreign languages. There was also an underlying thought of ‘how can the language teachers begin to collaborate with the subject teachers’. Thanks Franz, I hope I’ve described this accurately.

Congress Centre, Bad Hofgastein

‘What do you do with the language once you know what it is?’

I’m going to make this question from one of the participants at my workshop at the CEBS conference in Austria recently the focus for this report. You can click the links to the presentations in the text of the report on the sessions below and follow the discussion there.

Palace Hotel, live folk music in the bar was a treat!

Franz presents the keynote speech of Professor Albert Raasch from the University of Saarland

I also met Andreas Baernthaler (andreas.baernthaler@cebs.at) who is the CLIL coordinator for CEBS and also Barbara Gleiss (barbara.gleiss@cebs.at) who is a recent addition to the CLIL team in CEBS.

I gave two presentations. One was an interactive talk entitled ‘CLIL – where are we now?’ which was offered as a carrot to the language teaching participants to come and find out about what has been going on recently in bilingual education and CLIL around the world. This was at least from my personal perspective and with examples of contexts where I have had contact.

The second was a workshop called ‘CLIL – what’s in it for the language teachers?’ and speaking as a language teacher who has embraced the content curriculum as a context for teaching language, I had a few ideas I thought would be of interest to a language teaching audience.

Thoughts:

- I sat in on the plenary from Prof. em. Dr. Albert Raasch (armolfsee@aol.com) from the University of Saarland in Germany. My German was highly challenged but one thing I did understand was when Professor Raasch spoke about CLIL and he said ‘CLIL methodology is its own methodology’ and it’s not a case of just teaching a subject through a foreign language.

Andreas Baernthaler gets us started for the first talk

- I should mention the publisher exhibition in the foyer and corridor in the congress centre. It’s quite amazing how much material is being written and published locally for the foreign language medium vocational schools’ market in Austria. It may even be a good place for Bulgarian Tourism and Business Schools to look for resources in foreign languages (link to Velingrad report).
Trauner Verlag www.trauner.at
There is all manner of English-medium (and other language) textbook material for catering, hospitality services, kitchen management at this site.
http://www.trauner.at/buchliste.aspx?kat=153
Veritas www.veritas.at

A distributor and publisher in Austria with a range of English-medium (and other language) vocational and subject-specific textbooks on its shelves, including Cornelson and OUP materials.
Cornelson www.cornelson.de
Not an Austrian publisher but a substantial name in CLIL in Germany and the region.

Follow – up.
I’m returning to Austria in March 2010 to deliver a number of lectures at Vienna University and have been discussing with colleague Rosemarie Knoflach (bilingual Geography) in Innsbruck about adding on a couple of days to do a visit her school and run a workshop with her colleagues. Having met Andreas, thanks for the lunch and good conversation Andreas, we discussed my visiting him in Linz, perhaps en route to Innsbruck to work with teachers from his network. The idea here may be to brainstorm ideas for developing collaboration between language teachers and subject teachers and then begin to develop instruments and strategy for making it happen in schools. What an interesting project that would be to see become a reality. I’ll keep you posted. 

Presentations and Practical Activities in Graz

Campus02, University of Applied Sciences Degree Programme in IT and IT/Marketing, Graz, Austria,
April 1-2, 2005 
http://www.campus02.at/

Campus02 in Graz hosted two days of visiting lectures based on presentations and group tasks at the beginning of April. IT and IT/Marketing students at various stages of their programme of study participated in activities aimed at developing their presentation skills in a team and also their ability to work in groups and solve tasks as a team. This is the first of what is hoped will become a repeated event at the faculty.
   
Students were given the task of designing and building their own air-powered rockets with a specific logo, design and construction within a limited time. The students were then given a limited time to prepare and deliver a presentation based on their design, flight and observations following specific criteria (there was a prize for the best presentation!).
   
Colleagues interested in this activity (I'm sure you've noticed by now that it's a favourite of mine!) - The Rocket Factory – as well as many other practical educational activities can be found at Middlesex University Teaching Resources Unit (www.mutr.co.uk).
       
The Rocket Factory

Students were also treated to a drilling in the style of 'The Apprentice' from the BBC. In this activity I played the role of business tycoon Alan Sugar and the groups of students were given the task of designing a piece of software and then marketing the software to their peers in a limited time. Their software ideas could be as crazy as they liked as long as they could present it within 3 minutes and as a team.

I presented the idea to the group referring to an amazing story I had read in the Guardian 'Chip reads mind of paralysed man' (Ian Sample, Thursday March 31, 2005) which describes how a paralysed man can make a computer carry out functions with his thoughts.

Since the students were both IT and Marketing I thought the Apprentice as an activity would suit them well. What I didn't tell the students was that one of the groups would be sacked! While we were initially concerned that students might feel intimidated by my adopting an Alan Sugar role and firing them, they loved the whole activity!
The ideas were quite amazing given the limited time. There was the DreamCatcher which when logged in to your brain while you sleep records your dreams in MPEG format so that you can play them back the next day on your PC. Or, the E-Motion software which using blue tooth communication in a chip implanted behind the ear allows people to connect with those around them and identify the people with whom they share interests, passions, ideas and cut out the risky business of finding out about the likes and dislikes of a possible date. Or, the Brain Holiday which allows you to give your brain a rest from time to time by getting the computer to do the work of thinking for you (there was some discussion about that one).    

The students coped very well with the activities, that and having a visitor for the day. Elke Bedera and colleagues are already talking about a return visit. Let me see, maybe we can get them working on robot design next…

 

CLIL Workshop
Akademisches Gymnasium, Innsbruck

March 1st, 2010

I arrived at Vienna airport in Austria early on Sunday morning and got on a train to take me across the country to Innsbruck and stayed in the Hotel Sailer. This is the same hotel I stayed in 4 or 5 years ago when I first worked for the PH in Innsbruck. Thanks to Angelika Auer at thePH Tirol in Innsbruck or supporting the event and making it possible.


I met Rosmarie Knoflach at Norwich Institute for Language Education where Rosmarie was studying the CLIL module and I taught some of the programme. We kept in touch and Rosmarie talked about my coming to Innsbruck to deliver some training at her school, the Akademisches Gymnasium in Innsbruck.

I've had quite a bit of reason to visit Austria in the last couple of years and can see that the interest in CLIL is growing. It's significant not only in the grammar schools where some of the subject curriculum is offered through English, but there is also a large network of vocational schools (CEBS) where English is the medium of instruction.

There were 12 teachers at the day-long workshop, all from the Akademisches Gymnasium, Innsbruck.

Rosemarie gets us started

Rosmarie asked me to spend the day with her and colleagues and we agreed that I cover the following:

Introduction - What is CLIL?

Identifying language - which language?

(Vocabulary)

Task design - Providing language support

Resources and networks


Analysing language in content

My own feeling with most groups of teachers I meet recently who teach their subjects through English, is that they need simply to sit down with their textbooks, curriculum documents and other resources and look at and discuss the language in them, and how it is dealt with for their students.

I also met Luis Strasser, a georgapher at the school and a teacher trainer at the University in Innsbruck who is instrumental in setting up a pre-service CLIL course for teachers. A group of geography methodologists from several Austrian Universities issue a geographical periodical, which is available both online and in printed form, four times a year about its work in teacher training:

http://www.gw-unterricht.at/

There is a direct link, but you have to register to download the newsletter, so I've created a direct link with the outline of the training here.


Sharing information

Luis kindly provided this outline of BICEPS classes at his school

There was another factor in Innsbruck. The school had already set up a CLIL Group for teachers and it is a group which meets regularly to discuss teaching subjects through English. It was a small step for the group to move towards collaborative approaches to teaching where the language teachers and subject teachers combine ideas and forces to provide CLIL to learners. What became clear to me was that my agenda should take second place and that I should give room to getting colleagues paired up and if possible get them to look at the materials and tasks I'd brought as templates and ideas for their own collaboration and teaching needs.

With only one day to work with, this is precisely what happened. I'll keep you posted as to how they develop as a group. I think there is certainly much to learn from them about subject teachers and language teachers collaborating for CLIL.

After lunch the colleagues got together into the interest groups and discussed how to follow-up on the workshop, whether it be producing a model lesson based on the ideas and principles seen, creating a single task or other.

For my part, I agreed to keep in touch and help out where I could, and that means taking at a look at and offering suggestions for their resources.
These colleagues are joining the factworld egroup and Luis has joined Café CLIL number 10, so you might be able to talk to him there at the next discussion!

Many thanks to Macmillan for the freebies!

=26&tx_commerce_pi1[catUid]=20&cHash=c4bfc60aed]Locally published Geography in English

Austria - COOP CLIL 2015

The second round of in-service professional development for teachers in HTL, HAK and other schools in Austria.
The event took place in Salzburg, Nov 9th to 12th 2015.

Almost 90 teachers came from all over Austria.
Like the first COOP CLIL event last year, each subject teacher came along with a partner colleague from the English language teaching department.


Hotel Brunauer

The aim of the initiative, as it hints in the title, is to promote cooperation between subject teachers and language teachers.


initial group discussion

It's a worthy objective because there is plenty of evidence and experience to suggest that the best CLIL is coordinated collaborative CLIL where schools have a whole-school polilcy, involved department heads and school managers.


subject Ts discussing the role of language teachers in CLIL

The colleagues were asked to discuss their perspectives on the role of the language teachers in the CLIL projects in their schools. I split the groups into language teachers and subject teachers and asked them to carry out the discussion in small groups. They were then asked to note down the roles they identified and agreed on onto postits so that they could be shared with the whole group.


postits feedback

The feedback was extremely varied. Nevertheless, there were patterns and a consensus for much of the points presented.


mind map of roles for language teachers in CLIL projects

This Wordle of the feedback from the three groups gives a more visible representation of the most important issues discussed. There's nothing wrong with repetition. It doesn't suggest anything redundant, on the contrary, what it does suggest is that there is agreement on the more important issues.


Wordle on roles of language teachers in CLIL projects

There are a number of other issues that are out of my power to help as a contributor to PD. Money and time are two of these issues. Having said that, one of the products of our meeting was a list of ideas on the roles and possible contributions of the language teachers to the CLIL projects in Austrian schools. In addition, there may be something I can do to 'oil the machine' a little with a school visit. Two colleagues invited me to come visit their schools and work with local teachers, meet head teachers, department heads. I shall put on my best tie and get the message across that for the schools to be serious about collaboration between subject teachers and language teachers in CLIL projects, schools have to come up with paid time for teachers to actually sit down together and plan their cooperation in CLIL.

If you're interested hearing more about this this iniative in Austria, there is an article I wrote for TeachingEnglish.org.uk describing the first meeting, content and outcomes in the blog on this meeting.  My slides for the second event can be accessed here in this archive link.
 
I heard a rumour that there is a plan to organize a CLIL Conference next year in Linz. Watch this space!
 

Report on COOP CLIL Salzburg
(10th – 13th November 2014)

I was asked to prepare input on how language teachers can best collaborate with subject teachers. I’d prepared an agenda which explored ‘points of contact’ between the pairs of teachers including: subject content and language; thinking skills; seeing ‘shape’ in content; co-preparation and team teaching; observation and feedback.


Petra gets us started

We began with the language teachers and the subject teachers discussing separately their own perspectives on the role of the language teachers and then feeding them back in plenary. This gave a summary of ideas on what language teachers are actually doing, or what colleagues felt these teachers should be doing, in practice to support CLIL.


Colleagues at work

The exploration of ‘points of contact’ aimed at presenting colleagues with starting points to explore cooperative CLIL work in school.
In all three groups there was overwhelming enthusiasm for subject teachers and language teachers cooperating in CLIL. So much so that I decided with the groups’ agreement to cut my prepared agenda a little shorter in order to provide the pairs ‘hands on’ time to begin discussing their CLIL cooperation with respect to the points discussed so far.


Salzburg

This immediate cooperation is testament to the transparent good will among colleagues in HTLs to get down to the business of CLIL together given the opportunity to do so. The most glaring conclusion to my afternoon workshops is quite simply this very fact, that given the opportunity (time together) cooperation in HTL CLIL can be a very effective and fruitful experience but is sadly not as prevalent in school as we would like it to be for a number of reasons, and lack of organized time for language and subject teachers to get together is one of them.


Feedback on cooperation

I decided it would be a good idea to write up the meeting in an article and try and get it published. The reason for this is simply that managers and heads need to be aware of the bigger picture when it comes to implementing CLIL. It's not an exaggeration to say that effective CLIL implementation needs to be made on a school level at least. There are clearly success stories on an individual basis where lone teachers are working wonders in their own classroom, but for CLIL to be sustainable, schools need to have a policy and a practice for going into CLIL. This article makes some suggestions based on teacher feedback at the Salzburg meeting.

This article is published at the BBC - British Council teachingenglish website:
http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/keith-kelly-coop-e-clil-collaboration-between-language-teachers-subject-teachers

Thanks to everyone involved. It was such a success that we're already organizing a repeat for 2015!

My slides are linked below.
 

Oct 21st and 22nd, 2011
Paedagogische Hochschuele, Vienna

Eva Poisel invited me to contribute to her DLP course programme, and I readily agreed, knowing what I do about the work of the subject teachers in the schools involved. Plus, after meeting the HTL teachers (see reports), I wanted to shout about teachers linking up with and communicating with each other.

You could smell the brain cells smouldering as the group got their teeth into the texts I'd prepared for them to identify 'generic diagrammatical structure' in the texts, as well as identifying core language in texts with a view to reorganizing the language, manipulating the structures and making it available to students to support their learning of the subjects through English.

My main memories of this group were as much to do with their great personality as a group as with the content of the sessions. Their interaction was a treat, as were their comments, and they laughed at the right moments.

In short, on the one hand we explored language skills embedded in content materials while the teachers were encouraged to incorporate the activity types in their course assignments.

Assignments ranged from Christmas song writing making use of song writing frames, through learning vocabulary for musical instruments in an orchestra to combining art with mathematics. 

There is definitely a move in Austria to develop more English medium education in a variety of educational institutions. The reasons for this are clear, but the method of delivery is likely to be the major challenge.

Teachers while enthusiastic about teaching their subjects through English, are concerned on several fronts. They are worried about their own levels of English, they are anxious about the lack of resources and having to produce their own, and they are concerned about the demands on the learners that English-medium education will entail.

I'm delighted to be involved in this initiative in Austria, I'll try my best to support the teachers that I'm in touch with, and have offered to give feedback on their assignments and resource writing. What would be a major development, would be to get all the groups of teachers involved in CLIL actually communicating with each other, but my feeling is that teachers here generally are isolated when they could be helped to save resources, time and energy by systems which work towards networking, sharing and development.

DLP CLIL Course Group Photo
Many thanks to Eva for looking after me, (the fresh coffee was a treat Eva, thanks!).

The PH is a great location, and I got another invitation to visit another school (Heartbreaker Helmut, I'll be in touch!), and this will happen at some point in January, 2012, alongside my next training visit, or during one of the subsequent visits to Austria during the year.

 

1st CLIL Conference for Austrian BMHS

April 3rd and April 4th, 2014
University of Education, Vienna
Grenzackerstraße 18
1100 Wien

This was quite simply a great event!
It's the first meeting for a network of teachers from schools around Austria, all working in CLIL.

I've been teaching at the University of Education in Vienna since 2009 and started teaching CLIL to teachers from Austria's prestigious HTL Schools (these are Technical High Schools where teenagers learn construction engineering, computing, design and many other things) in 2011. There is a report on the first group in this course on this site.
In September 2013, legislation came into being which obliged all the HTLs to offer some of their year 3 curriculum through the medium of English. In the period 2011 to 2014 I've worked with around 300 teachers from these schools from a wide range of subjects.
There is a web portal to support the work of the teachers involved at the HTL main site with sample lesson materials from a number of subjects in English.
We also set up a Google Group called HTL-CLIL  with over 200 teachers at the time of writing.
HTL CLIL Teachers also have a page in facebook called CLIL Vienna with a growing audience.

The HTL CLIL Conference brought all of this energy together for a very dynamic event.
The conference proceedings are attached below.
 

PH Vienna

October 13th, 14th and 15th, 2011

The first thing to say about this course is that it takes place under a  government which is implementing a programme of legislation to see all HTL  schools (HTLs are upper-secondary technical and vocational colleges (for electronics, informatics, construction engineering, etc.) teaching at least 2 hours per week of a content subject or content subjects through the medium of English each year.
The exact details of the scope of this initiative are unclear. It just sounds as though the government is keen to get this up and running, and has broad guidelines at this stage which include schools identifying teachers to do the CLIL, and these teachers will all undergo training to support their work.
My role in this is as a trainer and Moodle moderator. I've been asked to contribute to the ongoing teacher training, as well as moderate the course Moodle platform, and assignments. 

What follows is a brief report on the first meeting and the first group.

PH WIen

Anna gets us under way...

Department heads are expected to identify teachers who are able to work through the medium of English, and it is largely these teachers who are targeted for participating in the HTL courses which are being carried out around Austria.

I'm including the course curriculum below which includes 4 modules over two years and which covers the basics of CLIL as well as a number of aspects concerning communicative language learning, text genre, task-based learning, and others, but always with a central focus on the participants creating language focus content materials to try out in their classrooms.

I am hopeless with names, though I try hard to remember them since one of my obsessions is keeping track of colleagues and their work. Hence the simple rhyming names memory game above which led to Statistical Simon, Problem Peter Gregarious Gunter and many others...

Colleague Simon Hibbert contributed to the programme and as a practising teacher of a content subject through the medium of English as a foreign language, he had a lot of valuable insights to offer the teachers on the course.

The teachers looked at interaction in the classroom and exploiting it as a tool for developing communication among students.

Group photo on a sunny October day in Vienna

There was some misunderstanding and lack of information on the part of the teachers as to what is going on at a decision-making level and also as to what exactly is expected of the teachers in their schools. I think the government has a job to do, to keep all well-informed and thereby ensure motivation and commitment on behalf of the teachers.

It can be tricky getting on with CLIL discussion when there are 'global issues' to deal with, and the first post-its feedback is dedicated to the challenges the teachers recognised, and expressed and which I promised to write up and make sure got to colleagues at the PH and the course administrators. Having said that, I wanted to give the participants time to focus on giving some constructive feedback on the course itself and above you can see their encouraging words about the content.

It's very motivating when colleagues do come up and say something about what's been prepared and in this case, there were several teachers who personally commented on different aspects of the course in positive terms. Many thanks!

It should be said also that for many of these teachers this is going to be the first time they have attempted teaching their subjects through the medium of English and so the learning curve is likely to be a steep one for them.    

Project assignments varied with the subjects of the colleagues, from supporting discussion in trigonometry ...

... through vocabulary for building design ...    

The Moodle platform dedicated to the course, this group and similar around the country is going to play a central role in supporting their work on the project, both in keeping in touch with each other, but also to be able to ask questions and share ideas.
I'm going to be back in the new year to work on Module 2 with this group, and will provide input on their assignments between now and then, and I will come back to contribute to further HTL courses at the PH in Vienna over the next two years. It will be a pleasure to be involved from the word go and to watch how things develop. One thing that has already come about as a result of our meeting, is that I've been invited to visit one of the schools on my next visit, which is always informative, great fun, and useful for the teachers involved because it draws attention to their work in an environment predominantly where CLIL teachers work in isolation and so need as much support as they can get!    

... providing visual support to listening on the topic of heat transfer ...

The course programme and a useful document giving the names in English and German the schools and institutions are attached below.
 

CLIL English teachers' course - Equipping English teachers for CLILTraunkirchen
October 18th and 19th, 2011

I had met Hans Kloibhofer previously at a training event in Linz and when he approached me to return to carry out some training for his colleagues, I readily agreed. I had in the back of my mind the memory of the colleagues being very eager to discuss teaching vocational subjects through the medium of English, and was sure that I'd be met with more debate, issues, challenges of the same stimulating Austrian variety.

This time the event was organized specifically for English teachers who work alongside the content teachers in the HTL schools (HTLs are upper-secondary technical and vocational colleges (for electronics, informatics, construction engineering, etc.) and the theme of the two-day workshop was 'Equipping English teachers for CLIL' but there was an overriding thread which was 'how to get content and language teachers collaborating'.

Hans Kloibhofer, Keith Kelly and Andreas Baernthaler
Pumpkin streudel was also very welcome on the menu!

The location was the usual breathtaking scene I've become accustomed to in Austria, in the beautiful village of Traunkirchen surrounded by jagged mountains and sitting as it does by the side of a lake, and we had sunshine for the duration.

Group photo on a sunny October day by the lake in Traunkirchen

I tend to plan too much for the sessions. This was the case in Traunkirchen, but we quickly found a solution, and that was to turn the relationship around and with my asking the colleagues what they would like to achieve from the two days input and adapt what I had prepared to meet their needs.

There was a good deal of discussion about the reasoning behind the training, as the title 'Why are we here?' sat on the screen for all to ponder. In actual fact, a meeting of English teachers working alongside content teachers in the HTL schools is a timely and essential first step in developing collaboration between language and content departments. As well as clarifying the current policy situation in Austria (thanks to Andreas Baernthaler for being with us to explain the details) which means that all HTL schools will have at least 2 hours per week in a content subject from year 3 through the medium of English. As far as I understand the situation, the current year one, will nationally go English-medium in a subject or subjects chosen by the school when the students reach year 3, and from then on each subsequent year group will follow with English-medium CLIL classes.

The cauliflower soup was delicious!

As it was, I'd been sent 4 textbooks from HTL curriculum areas to help with my preparation for the workshop (Business and management, Human Resources, Physics, Basic Electronics for Inventors - a thrilling summer reading list if ever there was one!). I had also spent some time reading the books, scanning for ideal content areas to work with for developing specific language skills, and with some of the content had managed to draft activities which a) highlight core language, and / or b) practice language embedded within the content.

The chestnut and plum rum mousse was unforgettable!

My aim was to get the teachers working in small groups to discuss a) and b) above share as a group and look at what I'd managed to do myself. I wasn't entirely sure how this would go down with the group as it can be fairly intensive a task and to get teachers doing 4 of them as well as deliver the rest of the programme... well, there was a risk of burn-out. As it was, the teachers all being language teachers were much more creative than I had been and made a wide range of creative suggestions, which I transcribed into a word doc for this purpose.


This word document will form the basis of the collection of ideas which Andreas and I will edit between us. We've unofficially given ourselves a deadline of the CEBS conference in Bad Hofgastein in October 2012 to have a finished publication.

Another objective we achieved was to set up and add colleagues to a discussion group for the growing community of teachers in Austria involved in CLIL. I rant on and on about how teachers need to be connected with each other in order to avoid reinventing the wheel every lesson, share ideas and resources and keep abreast of what is going on in their subject at home and in other countries working through English. As we said at the time, the group is now up and running with these 20 participants, we just have to wait and see how active and useful it will actually become. The group is housed at yahoogroups, and is called HTL_ELTs (htl_elts@yahoogroup.com).

The first follow up task was to upload all of the course presentations and handouts as well as some resources which were simply used as examples to the files folders in the htl_elts@yahoogroups.com. I'll try and place the same resources in box.net, so if you're interested you can take a look.

Second, I promised to write up the activities notes, and send updates to the group along with tasks so that the colleagues could contribute with suggestions, edit, correct, delete where they felt fit. In short, we have an editorial team of 20 for the HTL CLIL Guidelines book. Watch this space!


 

CLIL Workshop
Linz

2nd-3rd March, 2010

Hosted and accommodated by a regional training centre for agricultural colleges in the city of Linz.
I have to admit that I was a little daunted by the fact that the group of colleagues, teachers and trainers who were coming to attend the two-day CLIL workshop were from such diverse backgrounds as nursery school teacher training, engineering, and agricultural colleges!





I had to use my imagination to think up tasks which could be relevant and useful for these different groups.


Organized by the PH Linz

The programme was based around identifying language and designing tasks for CLIL, and then networks and resources to finish off with.

I was tempted to get the agriculturalists to do pre-school work and the nursery school trainers to look at economics...

When Isolde Tauschitz invited me to come and do a two-day workshop it was as a result of my participating at the recent CEBS conference in Bad Hofgastein. There, I met Andreas Baernthaler who is the CLIL coordinator for the CEBS organization.

Isolde starts the workshop


Market Square, Linz

I knew that there is a large number of teachers working through English in the vocational schools network in Austria and so I was delighted to come and work with them.

We started the workshop with handing out Bulgarian martenitsi. This is a tradition which marks the end of winter and a wish for health and long life along with a gift charm to wear around the wrist.


I started off with a simple task to get colleagues investigating language in a content activity. In the task the colleagues had to work together to create a genetic face based on facial feature options and DNA codes they were given to choose from.

They then had to describe their faces and in plenary we produced an overview of what language was involved.

All of this was placed within the context of the CLIL Cube which offers a framework for asking questions about learners working through a foreign language and whether or not they have a) conceptual skills, b) procedural skills, c) linguistic skills to do what we ask of them. Here, the concept was that the DNA code is like a recipe for facial features, the procedures had 'students' preparing their face and choosing from DNA codes carefully, and then presenting their face to the class and the language demands were clearly descriptive, possessives and talking about family.

Read the full article in onestopclil.com

We also looked later at heredity and the language of surveys which is taken from Science Across the World topic Talking about genetics

Colleagues feedback on a survey of 'hair colour' in the Linz group.

Another group feeds back a visual presenting diversity in eye colour in the group.

Can you roll your tongue?

We looked at a variety of test items and discussed the language demands of each. We came up with the concept of low and high risk items in terms of language.

Labelling test items with individual words carries low risk linguistic risk.

Labelling image of soil

Colleagues were given group interactive reading to do and then challenged to identify how they were constructed with a view to 'stealing' the principles in order to make their own for their subject areas.

Much of the discussion was in the mother tongue, even with this group, but the point is that the reading is interactive and the discussion meaningful.

Frequently these reading, discussing and sorting activities have a generic structure to them which can be identified and copied for another topic and task.

Linz group pic

Birgit missed the group pic and the group had broken up so here just for you Birgit! Thanks for your very encouraging words!

Colleagues were asked to create language support items through working with texts and identifying core language structures to a given content area.

A delightful outcome from the workshop, on top of meeting this group of teachers, was that Isolde and Sabine are both specialists in pre-school education and authors of this book. I mentioned a personal project I'm working on in Bulgaria in this area and they gave me a copy. That was very kind, thank you both very much! Will certainly let you know how things go and send you feedback on the book.


http://www.amazon.co.uk/Careers-Childcare/dp/3705882031

I had a great time with these teachers. They kept my energy level up for the two days. It was very nice of Markus to offer to give me a lift back to Vienna and I got to see something of the city on the way. Thanks Markus.
 

7 Day Workshop for Language Across the Curriculum

Paedagogisches Institut for Tirol, Innsbruck, Austria (www2.pi-tirol.at)

16 – 23 March, 2005

The Austrian government is reforming secondary education and one outcome will be that students will be able to opt for oral exmination in subjects from their content curriculum through the medium of English. The Teacher Training Institute in Innsbruck organised a workshop on issues related to integrating language and content for teachers in the state who may be involved in this process. Norwich Institute for Language Education
(www.nile-elt.com) was the partner institution providing the training.



The programme consisted of an overview of language development in content areas as well as a presentation of the Science Across the World programme of exchange projects www.scienceacross.org and colleagues produced a task for their own subject to take away and try out back in school.



The course went well in my opinion for the very reason that the participants see a specific need for their own development in this area. The bottom line is that they may be asked to offer students examination through English.


Rocket building and launching

I can’t say how this experiment will go but I wish the colleagues and the students luck. I do think that this is possibly just the beginning of a trend in Tirol which may see colleagues delivering their curriculum through the medium of English more widely in the future.

The colleagues became the first in Austria in the FACTWorld network and represented on the website at www.factworld.info. You’ll be able to download copies of materials colleagues wrote as well as see a full version of this report and pics. The colleagues also signed up to the FACTworld yahoogroups list and have begun discussion in their group about preparing a project proposal for materials writing which will help them in their new roles of CLIL teachers.


A speaking hexagon on Religions


Writing prose on Austrian biodiversity

Clustering arguments on scrapping fossil fuels

Logical connections – why elderly ladies are important for army fighting strength

Considering the evidence for a sixth mass extinction

Can you guess what it is?

Participants’ School websites:

www.villablanka.com – Villa Blanka Tourism School, Innsbruck

www.brg-app.tsn.at – The Bundesrealgymnasium, Innsbruck

www.brg-landeck.tsn.at - The Bundesrealgymnasium, Landeck

www.brg-reutte.tsn.at - The Bundesrealgymnasium, Reutte


The Group(less Henry)

Colleagues worked very hard for the 7 days on a very intensive course and I’d like to thank them for their commitment during a holiday, for their contributions and their sense of humour when the weather outside was glorious and we were inside discussing ‘the language of data’.

 

SprachenForum5 - CLIL in Austria 

I participated in a live discussion on CLIL in Austria recently and I promised to follow up with a few things for the teachers who participated.  

This short report is my fulfilling that promise and one document you can find at the foot of the page is a list of sites and networks several colleagues asked for.It's impossible to provide sites for all subjects of course, so please, do send us your 'go to' sites of choice and I'll publish them here. 


I had little idea what to expect. I did understand that we would show parts of my plenary talk on CLIL in Austria, past, present and future given at the KPH in Linz earlier this year.I also knew that we would have a live audience of groups of teachers (some 200 or so, going by the numbers we were able to count at the time) who would tune in to listen to our discussion.The teachers would also be asked to have their own discussions in their schools and feed questions to us live in the studio. It's a great idea and medium for ongoing professional development.You can watch the recording at this link or embedded in this page.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U779IvBYb-E 

Also, if you're in Austria, consider joining the 377 teachers already in the CLIL Google Group so that you can link with similar subject teaching colleagues. Write to me and I'll add you to the group.  

Lastly, there were far too many questions for Andreas and I to deal with, so we promised to write up answers to the remaining questions and post them on the CEBS site, and most likely here too when we manage to do that. I'll get on with that now!
Thanks for the experience!
 

Austria - Sprachenforum International 2018

I was privileged to participate in this important conference in Austria organized by the CEBS association.
You can find a host of papers and abstracts from the conference at the CEBS website - https://www.cebs.at 

I gave an interactive talk on how soft skills can be exploited to build a bridge between Language CLIL and Content CLIL.


Abstract: “Soft skills – a  bridge between content CLIL and language CLIL”
(Keith Kelly - keithpkelly@gmail.com)
More and more language teachers are becoming interested in CLIL, and asking themselves what they can do to 'get on board'. While many language teachers may not be able to offer a specialist content subject in English as a foreign language, what they can do is develop skills which are useful for students to use in their content classrooms. This workshop will examine a range of skills which are 'repeated' and recyclable across the curriculum and at the same time discuss the general academic language which accompanies these skills and which is also essential for the 'content CLIL curriculum'.
Participants will be asked to carry out tasks as students, discuss them as teachers and take them home to try out in their own classrooms.
 
I was also pleased to co-present with colleague Elke Kainz on CLIL training for teachers in agricultural and forestry colleges.


Abstract: ''Agri-CLIL - profession-specific CLIL for agricultural and forestry colleges''
(Keith Kelly - keithpkelly@gmail.com and Elke Kainz - elke.kainz@forstschule.at)
CLIL has been developing at a number of educational institutions around Austria over recent years and now is being embraced quite naturally at Agricultural and Forestry Colleges. This workshop will firstly offer an insight into the professional develop courses that are being offered to teachers and the CLIL pedagogy they are being asked to integrate into their teaching as well as examples from the lessons prepared by course participants following a CLIL approach. Secondly, participants will see a report from specific lessons in 'Soil Analysis', including aims and objectves, materials used as well as outcomes and feedback from students' work.
Participants will be asked to discuss the role of CLIL in the wider educational context and in preparing young Austrians for the world of work.

PDFs for both presentations can be found at the foot of this page, and I'm in the process of writing an article outlining 'Soft Skills - a bridge between content CLIL and language CLIL'.
As usual, Austria forges ahead in CLIL, moving CLIL into other sectors such as forestry and agriculture (nursery school educator preparation too!).
Watch this space!

CLIL Workshop
Vienna

March 4th and 5th, 2010

This was a one and a half day workshop plus a half day workshop. The course within which I was asked to participate as a trainer has been running for a considerable time already and the first group I met was a new group. The course is known as the Dual Language Programme and there are a number of schools around Vienna with teachers graduated from this course.

I also learned that there are a number of Native Speaker Teachers employed in these schools to support the work of the DLP teachers. I met two of these teachers in my workshops. It sounds like a great job except that the teachers don't get the same contract as Austrian teachers and each contract is really down to negotiation between individuals and their schools, though I'm told that there is discussion going on to do something about this and bring in legislation to recognize qualifications colleagues bring from abroad to these jobs. The more I hear about problems with recognition of qualifications in the EU the more I dispair. It's incredible how many problems colleagues meet all over Europe, despite the Bolognia process. keithpkelly@yahoo.co.ukyour good and bad stories please.


Eva Poisel was our kind host at the PH. Many thanks to Eva for her impeccable organization of the workshops.

... and Eva didn't disappear to get on with admin as a lot of colleagues do, she sat in and participated!

The teachers ranged from philosophy to music and they were all very keen to look at the language demands of their subjects and design tasks with this language embedded within - the heart of the whole workshop.

Colleagues brought their own textbooks and examined the illustrations within with a view to exploiting them for language support purposes.

Group Pic on a chilly day in Vienna

We did survey work and this group carried out the speed reaction test from the Science Across the World programme.

The group was quite poor at the test so they all agreed that they would wear fluorescent clothing at night to make sure they are safe on the roads!

There was a lot of interest in language analysis and task design and I think it's because there is a need in the schools where the teachers come from. There are more schools offering more CLIL and so more children from 10 to 18 studying through English and this means more need for a focus on language.
I met Mike and Claudia and we talked about a school visit. I'm sure I'll be back and will report on what goes on in the classroom when I do.


 

The University of Vienna department of Linguistics have an active and productive team working in CLIL.
They have produced a number of interesting collections of articles online. While the materials seem to move location over the years, with a search you can still find them via their website:

https://anglistik.univie.ac.at/

for example:
https://anglistik.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/dep_anglist/weitere_Uploads/Views/Views0501ALL.pdf

Christiane Dalton-Puffer works from here, and if you're not familiar with her book on language in CLIL Classrooms in Austria. It's a good source of data on how language works in CLIL classrooms and how it is used in Austria specifically.

Discourse in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) Classrooms By Christiane Dalton-Puffer
 

Vienna, Linz and Wiener Neustadt, Jan 11 - 17, 2012

I spent 6 days in Austria last week working with 3 groups of teachers from HTL Schools, or Technical High Schools, all now getting their heads around offering their technical curriculum through the medium of English. This is a move which the Austrian Ministry of Education has legislated to be compulsory for all HTL schools to implement English-medium education in some form from year 3. Of course, on the ground, how schools bring this about depends on many factors. Schools, headteachers and heads of deparment are the real decision makers in how to deliver the curriculum through English.

Wiener Neustadt HTL    

1) Meeting 1 was a brainstorming at the Wiener Neustadt HTL where colleagues met to discuss content for in-service training for colleagues with a view to expanding and consolidating English-medium technical lessons.
This is one option for Austrian HTL teachers that is organizing their own training where the input comes from their colleagues. One particular idea of the many shared on this afternoon was that it is not 'CLIL' that is needed. What is needed, it was suggested, is something which is much simpler. It is an approach which takes the technical subject, its content, concepts and skills as the starting point and looks at what the teacher and students need to function in the foreign language.
I have to say that I'm a little suspicious of this view and will come back to talk about it later.

PH Wien

2) Meeting 2 was at the PH in Vienna, a 3-day training which made up Module 2 of an ongoing 4-module course for HTL teachers as part of Ministry of Education initiatives to offer in-service training to teachers as part of its plans to roll out its English-medium project into practice in schools.
I learned a lot from this meeting.

The training I contributed to is based on a training programme provided by the Ministry of Education and has many broad aims.

Alongside the desire to see teachers equipped with lessons to try out in school, the curriculum covers a wide range of areas of linguistic theory and acquisition. Now we're in Module 2, I'm convinced that the training has to stay focused on the subjects the teachers teach and the methods they use to teach their subject.

The agenda we put together and that you can see here, followed the curriculum for training provided by the Ministry of Education.

All in all the feedback was good, and with the lessons learned from the experience I'm sure that group 2 coming to the course soon will get a much improved rewritten first two modules of the course!

I have to say that the success is largely a reflection of the teachers themselves. We had a terrific relationship right through the course despite a few bones of contention we had to chew on! This brings me back to my suspicions mentioned above.
I suspect that I'm not getting my message across, and that there are still teachers out there who don't believe that their students need language support to be able to 'do' the subject in the foreign language. The jury is still out. I just know that I have to get myself into some of these HTL classrooms to see and hear the students at work (any volunteers?) ... and I'm glad that I'll be keeping in touch with all of the teachers facilitating with their assignments and helping to coordinate their group in the Moodle platform they are using for the course.

3) Meeting 3 was a contribution to an annual meeting of language and content teachers at HTL schools in Leonding HTL (www.htl-leonding.at), Linz.
Here, we had a large group of English teachers (many of whom have content second subjects) who work alongside technical teachers in the HTL. This group feels some pressure to be in collaboration in this move to English-medium Education handed down from the Ministry of Education. Their reactions are varied as you can imagine, but I think it's true to say that they are all looking for a role for themselves.

Leonding HTL

I reported the feedback from the course in Vienna and did an introduction to CLIL and then set the group the task of analysing and working on technical subject texts with a view to suggesting activities and exploitation in the classroom.

The reason for all this is that Andreas Baernthaler and I are working together on compiling a resource book for English-medium HTL CLIL teachers. Andreas, who teaches at the Leonding school and is also coordinator for CLIL in the CEBS assocation (http://www2.cebs.at/) in Austria has been talking about this idea for some time now and if all goes well, we will have something in draft form to present at the CEBS conference in Bad Hofgastein in Oct 2012.
There are teething problems, but the energy from many of the teachers is driving the process. Watch this space, English-medium Education is growing in Austria!