I received an invitation to give a presentation at the ETAS www.e-tas.ch 23^rd AGM and Conference and made a number of CLIL contacts which made the trip a full and fruitful one.

My journey started with delays and turbulence flying from Luton airport and arriving late, waking up the hotel but eventually getting the key to my room and a welcome night’s sleep.

I spent the whole of Friday at the Hull School (www.hullschool.ch) where a programme of study through the medium of English is on offer to local young people.  The school is the first in Switzerland which offers a 10^th School Year taught in English.  I was privileged to be able to sit on four morning classes in Science, History, Mathematics and Economics.  The groups are small, the rooms well-resourced and the teachers are native speaker subject teachers.  The students come from a variety of backgrounds and are predominantly Swiss teenagers with some children from international families.  It was a fascinating experience to be able to observe the lessons, many thanks to the teachers for welcoming me into their classrooms.  I suspect that there is room for considerable growth in this form of educational provision in many contexts around the world given the current mobility of teachers, resources, examinations and learners.

Olten Grammar School
www.kantiolten.ch

Saturday 20^th January

The next day took me off to Olten to work with colleague Eveline Reichel who is coordinating CLIL training for the Gymnasium in the town.  I gave a 60-minute presentation focusing specifically on materials and sample tasks to the 16 teachers who gave up their Saturday to come along.  This group is a fairly unique phenomenon in Switzerland, I believe, but one which is likely to grow with the interest in CLIL in both the content teaching and the EFL teaching worlds.  There is some concern among the ELT community about CLIL and what this may mean for language teachers, but I hope that CLIL can be embraced and exploited for all it offers to language education.  We’ll see.

After lunch at the ETAS Conference I presented a talk entitled: CLIL: Defining Content and Language Integrated Learning to an audience of language teachers.

The abstract to the paper is as follows:

Is teaching anything in a foreign language now called 'CLIL'? Is teaching some content in a language lesson the same as teaching content in a foreign language?  Content and Language Integrated Learning is becoming more and more popular with both language and content teachers around the world. This growth has led to an expansion in the number of approaches being offered to teachers, the courses available and generally the interest in this area of education, though little in terms of published materials for teachers. What exactly does good CLIL practice mean? What exactly does it mean to support language in content education?

  This paper gives an insight into the provision of ‘language support’ to learners of foreign language content will offer a working definition for this term. Participants will see a wide range of examples of content materials from around the world and the language demands teachers have identified as well as the subsequent 'language support' activities they have produced.

The talk was attended by several more than there was allocated space for in the room and so some had to stand at the back.  The main point of note about the presentation, an introduction to the issues in CLIL, was that my outline to the talk caused more confusion than it was helpful.  It turns out that teachers had an idea of what CLIL was which was muddied by my talk.  I think we cleared it up.  The English teachers in the room were interested to hear that there is an ELT perspective of CLIL as opposed to the Content CLIL perspective that they know of and which is subject teachers teaching the medium of a foreign language.  EFL has adopted CLIL recently.  The CLIL Guardian debate at the Cardiff IATEFL conference and also David Graddol’s writings on the future of English has brought CLIL firmly into the EFL domain.  There are also local publishing houses around Europe producing ELT CLIL resource books.

ETAS Conference at the Solothurn Grammar School

The repetition of the presentation on the Sunday morning gave me the chance to discuss this question more deeply in my introduction.  I decided to show colleagues some of the resources available on the Science Year CDs at www.sycd.co.uk as a focus for discussing how language teachers can easily bring content into their classrooms which is relevant to the content curriculum.  The group produced their own planet with the Planet10 software on the ‘Is their life?’ CD, called it ETAS and launched it into the universe but sadly it was too close to the sun and life was boiled and fried.  I also focused on the Science Across the World www.scienceacross.org programme with its practical science projects and the wonderful language support materials with the more recent topics.  These are of particular value to language teachers getting started in CLIL since they are ready-made resources and are written by both content and language specialists.

I met some very interesting colleagues such as Jo who is in the position of having to teach Geography in English to 9 and 10 year old Swiss French speakers without adequate resources.  This is the value of networks like FACTWorld because I know there are colleagues in the group teaching Geography in English and I am sure they will be glad to communicate with Jo and point her in the right direction.