Forum for Across the Curriculum Teaching Journal Issue 11

Key terms from the articles and lessons in this journal are:

Activities Ideas; Eating in History; Share your World experiences; European Committee report

Content:


S. Teneva - Five Activities 

D. Tassotti - Using and improving materials - what do you eat in History lessons 

M. Koeva - Dear Friends/Colleagues (M. Koeva shares experience of working on "Share Your World") 

P. Kernen - Minutes of The European Committee 

CLIL in One Minute (#CLILin60s)
1 It's all about the cognitive discourse functions and their activation.

- Rodope Mountain Forest Walk and Activities with Senses (2025.07.15)


- Stickman story, craft and song (2025.07.02)


- Measuring and Water (2025.06.09) 


- Sequencing in Today is Monday (2025.06.03)


- Sorting in Transport (2025.05.14)


- Counting in Stories (2025.05.09)


- Planting Herbs (2025.04.28)


- Pollination (2025.04.10)







 

Aleksandra Zaparucha has an MA in Geography (1989) and English (2001) gained at the Nicolas Copernicus University (UMK) in Toruń, Poland. She has been teaching both for almost 20 years, and four years ago she started teaching Geography bilingually in the Secondary School Complex no. 10 in Toruń. She is also teaching general English in Empik language school as well as various courses at the UMK (general English, British Studies, Irish Studies, Socio-economic Geography). In 2006/2007 she led the first CLIL course for future Geography teachers at the UMK. She has co-operated with Field Studies Council, Geographical Association and British Council at various events, courses and publications, and is the author of three translations of Polish Geography textbooks into English, as well as numerous articles in Polish, British and Irish magazines on teaching Geography, English and Geography in English. (olazap@wp.pl)

Anglia School opened in September 2012.  

At Anglia School not only do we provide a rich learning environment we also immerse your child in the English language. Our curriculum has been developed to include a wide range of skills and competencies to reflect and provide for the individual personalilities and learning styles of each and every child who comes to us.

You can visit Anglia School's bilingual site.
You can join Anglia School facebook page.
You can view Anglia School YouTube channel.

Enjoy!

 

Anglia Summer School - Trashed!

We're planning a busy programme for the summer at Anglia School this year, June to September 2015.

Our Juniors will focus exclusively on DIY and Recycling and each week will create products for us to 'sell' in our charity shop to raise funds for our adopted local charity 'Parallel World', a charity helping disabled children in Plovdiv. 

The first 6 themes are:

01 - General waste:
We'll examine travel and nature around Bulgaria and learn about different types of waste and how they affect different parts of Bulgaria. The children will produce their own nature-rubbish landscapes and collages. 

02 - Photography-My home town:
The children will learn how to use a digital camera and will investigate their local environment taking pictures of evidence of waste pollution where they live and learn what can be done about it. The children will produce an exhibition of their photography. 

03 - DIY Paper-Rainforests:
The children will look at their own use of paper and card products, talk about deforestation and how paper can be recycled and reused. We will pulp used paper products and press them to make new paper and decorative cards. 

04 - Cosmetics-Science at home:
We'll investigate various cosmetics and cleaning materials we use at home. The children will make their own soap, shampoo and bath salts. 

05 - Papier mache-Showtime:
The children will learn about magic tricks, do their own performances and practice puppet shows. We'll make masks and puppets from papier mache and used fabric materials. 

06 - Flight-Space adventure: We investigate the science of various forms of flight including kites, planes, rockets. The children will make beautiful kites, high-flying rockets and long-range paper planes. 

Those of you who know the Science of the World programme will recognize some of the ideas at the heart of this summer programme.
We'd love to share some of our investigations into Bulgarian culture, life and products with partners around the world.

If you think your class or a colleague's might be interested please get in touch (keith@anglia-school.info) and we'll discuss summer exchange ideas. 

Best wishes
Keith
www.anglia-school.info  

YACs in Argentina
Young Ambassadors for Chemistry came to South America from May 9th to 15th. 2005 

I arrived in Argentina after a 13 hour flight and 2 hours sleep and was met by Monica Tosi, the Science Across the World coordinator for South America, tired but excited about the prospect of taking YACs to another location.



This is our second YAC event, following on from a fantastic week in Taiwan last year.

The initiative is sponsored by the International Union for Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC www.iupac.org) and GlaxoSmithKline (www.gsk.com) through Science Across the World (www.scienceacross.org).

The workshop was hosted by ESSARP, the English Speaking Scholastic Association of the River Plate (www.essarp.org.ar) in the heart of Buenos Aires.

Colleagues from around Buenos Aires followed a three day programme of workshops which focused on the Science Across the World programme of educational exchanges and preparing Science Day events for young people in order to raise public understanding of Chemistry.

Participants were signed up the Science Across the World programme and got the chance to get their hands on the programme materials which focus on getting students involved in investigations of local lifestyle and culture through Science issues and then exchanging this data with partner classrooms around the world.

Over the three days we attracted 13 teachers, each of whom expressed surprise that there weren’t more teachers at the workshop, that it should have been publicised more among the language teaching community and that it is difficult to get teachers into workshops in Argentina for a number of reasons, not least because getting time off school for such events is a problem.

Having said that, all of the teachers who attended were very enthusiastic about the Science Across programme and the YACs idea to the extent that the group produced a plan of action themselves for introducing the programme in their schools, sharing it among colleagues and developing it in the region.

Colleagues built models of DNA from sweets

… and produced and presented their own line of cosmetics

Eva, our trusty assistant at ESSARP, produced a wonderful booklet of the Science Across materials in the two languages, Spanish and English.

Thanks also to Tomas for providing technical assistance quickly and effectively whenever we shouted for help.    

Monica Tosi spoke about the development of the Science Across programme in South America, recent events and future plans.

Dr Norma Nudelman (FCEyN, UBA, CONICET superior researcher, member of the Academia Nacional de Ciencies Exactas) spoke on the topic of ‘Green Chemistry for a Cleaner World’. Dr Carlos Calvo (chief of the Biological Chemistry department in FCEyN, UBA researcher in the ‘Leloir Institute’ CONICET) gave a presentation on the theme ‘From DNA to Cloning, a story that is just beginning’. 

Thanks to our partners in the initiative, small and large. Bio Rad (www.biorad.com) provided us with a free DNA extraction kit as a prize for our cosmetics workshops for the best ‘performer’ in the group. Dolores was pleased with this!

Cognis (www.cognis.com) also provided us with detergent for the cosmetics workshops.

YAC Day      
More than 30 students worked on cosmetics and DNA models in the events building of the beautiful Japanese Gardens in Buenos Aires.

The Autumn weather behaved for us to bring in a flow of visitors throughout the day as children built a DNA model from sweets and produced lines of cosmetics.
 
The final DNA model was about 5 metres in length and the youngest group of cosmetics chemists won prizes including a YAC t-shirt for their cosmetics TV commercial.
 
Many thanks to Horacio Kagami (horaciokagami@yahoo.com.ar) the managing director of the Fundacion Espacios Verdes for allowing us to set up our YAC camp for the day in the Japanese Gardens and for hosting this wonderful day. The excitement and enthusiasm of the children, their activity and noise made sure that we attracted lots of attention from the passing public. Exactly what we wanted! 
Finally, it was great to have Nicolas Fossati with us, the young artist who designed our YAC emblem. Nicolas designed the emblem when he was still at school but has since gone on to study art at University in Buenos Aires. Thanks Nicolas and good luck!
   
PS – final thoughts…
This was a small group and we’ve learnt some useful lessons about publicity and networking with schools for future similar events. My hat goes off to the colleagues who came to the workshops. They worked very hard often travelling long distances to get to be with us after a full day’s teaching. Their enthusiasm for the Science Across the World programme was clear and we look forward to having them in our growing family of participants. It has always been our experience that once we get a group of teachers in a room together and we have the opportunity to present them the Science Across programme, they invariably love it. The same thing happened here. Formal lines of communication didn’t seem to get our message across and we need to find a different approach in contacting schools and teachers.
Coincidentally, I met Analia Kandel (akandel@arnet.com.ar) headteacher, radio presenter and teacher trainer at the University of Buenos Aires and we discussed the issue of getting teachers to workshops. Not only did Analia agree to promote the programme for us and arrange for sessions with Monica Tosi introducing the programme to trainee teachers, but she also got me in to her school, Boston College, before I left to teach three lessons with over a hundred students on a selected number of Science Across activities. She also introduced me to 7 of her teachers in the short time I was there. Perhaps there’s a lesson for us here on ways and means of contacting teachers and networking in Argentina.    
 
If the teachers can’t come to us, we need to go to them!

This is a a reference list, there are links to the comments and it's offered with latest read first.

27 - Learning while using an additional language

A letter I wrote in to reply to an article in the School Science Review, which was exploring the supporting of language in classes where students include students for whom English is not their mother tongue. I won't put comments here, just to say that I respond to a couple of important points in the article and refer to CLIL by way of solution.

SSR March 2018, 99(368) 9-10
 
26 - Speaking English in Finnish content-based classrooms
 
One of the most well-known countries not just for integrating content and language but also for quality education on the whole, anything from Finland has to be worth a read.

NIKULA TARJA (2007) tarja.nikula@campus.jyu.fi

http://www.helsinki.fi
 World Englishes, Vol. 26, No. 2, pp. 206–223 (article) Wiley link

Comments and summary are offered here
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25 - Thinking and Content Learning of Mathematics and Science as Cognitional Development in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL): Teaching Through a Foreign Language in Finland.

Jaeppinen A K (2005) Language and Education (article)
ERIC link

Comments and summary are offered here.
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24 - Collaborative interaction in turn-taking: a comparative study of European bilingual (CLIL) and mainstream (MS) foreign language learners in early secondary education

Moore, Pat (2011)
International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism
First published on: 06 January 2011 (iFirst)
(article)

I've written up a page with quotes, comments, conclusions, and follow up here.
---
23 - TIMELINES AND LIFELINES: Rethinking Literacy Instruction in Multilingual Classrooms

Jim Cummins | Vicki Bismilla | Sarah Cohen | Frances Giampapa | Lisa Leoni
o r b i t , V o l 3 6 , N o 1 , 2 0 0 5 (pp 22-26)
(article)

Link and notes
---
22 - Immersion and CLIL in English: more differences than similarities

David Lasagabaster and Juan Manuel Sierra
ELT Journal Volume 64/4 October 2010; Oxford University Press
(article)

Link and notes
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21 - Teaching for Cross-Language Transfer in Dual Language Education: Possibilities and Pitfalls

Jim Cummins
TESOL Symposium on Dual Language Education: Teaching and Learning Two Languages in the EFL Setting (Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey, Friday, September 23, 2005)
(article)

Link and notes
---
20 - Learning English and Other Languages in Multilingual Settings: Myths and Principles

Andy KIRKPATRICK
Hong Kong Institute of Education
Oct 2009
(article)

Link and notes
---
19 - Translanguaging in the Bilingual Classroom: A Pedagogy for Learning and Teaching?

ANGELA CREESE, ADRIAN BLACKLEDGE
The Modern Language Journal 94 (2010) (pp 113-115)
(article)

Link and notes
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18 - Minumum Competence in Scientific English
 
Sue Blattes, Veronique Jans, Jonathan Upjohn
EDP Sciences, Grenoble, 2003
(book)
 
Link and notes
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17 - Developing Material for Physical Education Lessons in CLIL

Meike Machunsky 2007
(article)

Link and notes
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16 -  The Language of Chemistry: A New Challenge for Chemistry Education 

Chemistry International Journal of IUPAC
http://old.iupac.org/publications/ci/2010/3205/1_kelly.html
(Feature article)

Link and notes
---
15 Evaluation Report of the Bilingual Education Programme, Spain

Spanish Ministry of Education website
(Article)

Link and notes
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14 Multilingualism in Mathematics Classrooms: Global Perspectives
 
Richard Barwell (2009) Multilingual Matters
(Book)

Link and notes
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13 Content and language Integrated Learning (CLIL) Teaching Mathematics in English

Nadja Wilhelmer (2008) VDM, Austria
(Book)

Link and notes
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12 Speaking up - announcing a multilingual revolution

Matthias Krug article for Abode Magazine 
(article)

Link and notes
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11 USING TWO LANGUAGES WHEN LEARNING MATHEMATICS

JUDIT MOSCHKOVICH
Educational Studies in Mathematics (2005) 64: 121–144
DOI: 10.1007/s10649-005-9005-1 C Springer 2005
(article)

Link and notes
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10 Assessing Effects of Directive Complexity on Accuracy of Task Completion in English Language Learners

Chisato Komatsu and Joseph C. Witt Louisiana State University
 School Psychology Review, 2006, Volume 35, No. 4, pp. 552-567
(article)

Link and notes
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9 Learning Geography Bilingually

LUKE DESFORGES & RHYS JONES
Journal of Geography in Higher Education, Vol. 28, No. 3, 411-424,
November 2004
(article)

Link and notes
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8 Mathematical Communication in the Classroom: A Teacher Makes a Difference
 
Bessie Davis Cooke and Dilek Buchholz (2005)
Early Childhood Education Journal, Vol. 32, No. 6, June 2005
(article)

Link and notes
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7 The complementary contributions of Halliday and Vygotsky to a 'Language-based Theory of Learning'.

Wells, G (1994)
Linguistics and Education, 6(1), 41-90
(article)
 
Link and notes
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6 Developing critical understanding of the specialised language of school science and history texts: A functional grammatical perspective.

Len Unsworth (1999)
Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 42: 7 April, pp 508-521
(article)

Link and notes
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5 Using Halliday’s functional grammar to examine early years worded mathematics texts

Keiran Abel & Beryl Exley
Queensland University of Technology
Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, Vol. 31, No. 3, 2008. pp. 227–241
(article)
 
Link and notes
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4 Bilingual Geography

What do German students think about geography lessons in English?
CHRISTIANE MEYER 
GEOGRAPHY, VOLUME 89 (3), 2004, PAGES 274-277
(article)

Link and notes
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3 BILINGUAL KNOWLEDGE (BIK-) MAPS: STUDY STRATEGY EFFECTS.

Bahr, G. S. and D. F. Dansereau 
Available from the first international conference proceedings on concept mapping.
(article)

Link and notes
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2 Bilingual Knowledge Maps (BiK-Maps) in Second-Language Vocabulary Learning.

Bahr, G. S. and D. F. Dansereau
The Journal of Experimental Education, 2001, 70 (1), 5-24.
(article)

Link and notes
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1 The Inclusive Classroom: Teaching Mathematics and Science to English-Language Learners. It's Just Good Teaching.

Jarret, D (1999).
Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, 101 SW Main Street, Suite 500, Portland.
(article)
 
Link and notes

Assessment in CLIL

Examples of assessment instruments uploaded as a result of discussion in Younglearners @ yahoogroups, April 20th - 24th, 2009

On the Basque website you will find a number of interesting instruments for gathering information about achievement, both for peer assessment and teacher assessment.  Note that the objectives state both language and content targets.You'll find four files for download from the Basque project at the foot of this page:

- Objectives
- Peer assessment
- Teacher assessment 1
- Teacher assessment 2

I've worked with a lot of colleagues in this area, and am linking two instruments at the foot of the page that they have shared with me, just for your information.  They serve only as examples of attempts at creating CLIL assessment instruments:
- CLIL 1 - CEF model
- CLIL 2 - integrated descriptor model


Overview of assessment risks (J Clegg) (linked in Word doc below)

Take a look at Geri Smyth
Helping Bilingual Pupils to Access the Curriculum, Fulton, 2003


Language is mapped onto the curriculum ...


... this feeds into assessment ...

Send us your test instruments, sample tests, I'll upload them here.

Asturian CLIL

16th-19th Feb, 2009

Getting to know content and language integration in Asturias

I’ve just spent a delightful three days in Asturias in Northern Spain.  Even the EasyJet flight which took me back to Bulgaria from Stansted had a piece on Asturias in its magazine. 
Never having been there before, I knew very little about the place, thanks to my host Gilberto now I know much more.


Asturias from neighbouring hillside

Ramiro I out on a hunt, lodge in background

I know about the Cross of Victory in the Cathedral in Oviedo and King Ramiro I, as well as his hunting lodge.
Asturias has a large network of primary and secondary schools, around 140, working in content and language integration.  Many of the schools have been delivering parts of their curriculum through English as a foreign language for the last five years.    

hunting lodge today

The CPR, Oviedo

Gilberto Fernandez (gilbertotf@educastur.princast.es) works as a trainer and advisor at the CPR or Centro de Professorado y Recursos.  We coined a new name for them while I was there - CardioPulmonary Rescucitation Unit – task force of specialists with the brief to keep the network healthy and in good shape, and Gilberto invited me to come and work with his network over a busy two days.
Straight from the airport, Gilberto whisked me off to a number of sites in Asturias’ capital Oviedo where he told me about the country’s history, culture, language and much more and then treated me to wonderful food and drink from the region. 

I won't forget the Oricios in a hurry!

I learned that if you go to a cider bar in Oviedo you should take an umbrella with you!

Education Ministry Asturias

CPR site 

I met first of all with 10 of Gilberto’s colleagues who all support the work of language teachers and content and language teachers around the country and we were joined by Pilar Cortejoso Hernandez (PILARCH@princast.es) from the Asturian Ministry of Education (www.educastur.es).  Gilberto and I had discussed what I should present and we came up with resources, assessment and training.  Needless to say that the agenda took a slightly indirect route as questions arose and colleagues wanted to go off in a different but related direction.  In the process it was an ideal opportunity for me to hear at first hand about the development of the bilingual programme in Asturias, its problems and successes.

I prepared material based on my brief from Gilberto, but experience tells me that you can never really tell the agenda until you arrive, and so I took plenty of extra bits and pieces with me.    

All of the trainers and advisors signed up to the factworld yahoogroup and I’m hoping that we can get one or two of them to join us in discussion in Café CLIL at some point to share their many experiences with the rest of us.     
 
Gilberto gets us started with primary CLIL teachers' network

After a break, we came back to the CPR to prepare for a group of 100 or so primary teachers from the bilingual schools network.
I spoke about primary CLIL and techniques for identifying language from the content curriculum.  I also showed a number of sources of primary materials and we talked about issues to do with evaluation, but again with a focus on language within content. 

I showed the group the science across the world website and thanks to David for agreeing to be my guinea pig to show the signing up process live to the rest of the group.

I advertised the www.onestopclil.com website to shout about, among other things, the lesson share competition going on at the moment with the great prize to be had – you didn’t know?  Well, take a look, NILE are offering a free course as a prize on one of their courses to the winner! 

I showed the Science Year CDs (www.sycd.co.uk - now hosted at the STEM website) with all that they have to offer for teachers looking for great resources, but did stress that there may still be a need for adding language!
 
I’ve always felt that CLIL at its heart is about just that, about what you do with the language, how you deal with the language, how you support the learners as they process and produce language in their content curriculum.  It’s important to stress this point as there are many perspectives on CLIL appearing today.  CLIL is described as a whole-student approach to education, involving good relations with the community and parents, a focus on cultural knowledge and many others.  For me, however, what sets CLIL apart from other approaches, whether they be language or content approaches is what is done to embed language in task, what is done to scaffold learners in their learning so that they have language accessible to them to enable them to carry out a task (the rest, by and large, is just good practice and to a certain extent we all agree about it).  I think there is disagreement about the language principle in many areas and indeed colleagues have suggested to me that in a content lesson focusing on language may distract learners from the content, some (both language teachers and content teachers) even suggest that it’s unnecessary and that language will come in the rich language bath learners are being given in content lessons in English.  My feeling is that not to pay attention to language in content means not to pay attention to all of the learner’s needs and that a teacher’s job includes knowing what to expect from learners in terms of language to express their content, knowing how to provide learners with this language when and where they need it during content tasks in their classrooms.

This issue came up a lot during my visit to Asturias.  This doesn’t mean that colleagues in Asturias took the opinion I describe above, far from it, we were in total agreement about the role of language in content teaching.  The visit was however a springboard for me to express this idea a number of times during the presentations and workshops I gave.

It's what you do with the language that counts!

Fernandez Vallin school, Gijon

Second day to Gijon to visit Fernandez Vallin school (web.educastur.princast.es/ies/fvallin) where the entire science department is teaching its curriculum through the medium of English.  I have to take my hat off to Asturias and colleagues in this programme.  It is by law forbidden to select students for these programmes, and this means that students from all backgrounds appear in CLIL classrooms in Asturias.  This school was a wonderful atmosphere of energy and enthusiasm -  thanks to Luiz, Gloria and colleagues for their warm welcome and engaging discussion as well as the students of the 2nd year class I observed doing their biology in English.

I observed a biology lesson given by Gloria and Carrie with half a class of 13 year olds.  They are lucky in this school to be able to split groups so that learners get more teacher time and attention in the bilingual programme. My observation notes are linked below.

The class did a lot of work on vocabulary for habitats and adaptation

Carrie and Gloria teaching Biology in English

Year 2 class studying through English at Fernandez Vallin school, many thanks!

In the afternoon, we returned to Oviedo for a second three hour workshop with around 100 sercondary teachers of content subjects through the medium of English.

The group was very interactive and had many questions and points to raise as I spoke about the points below and showed resources.  Gilberto had asked me to be sure to talk about collaboration between English teachers and subject teachers.  We brought this issue down to the very specific concrete job that both can do which is to identify an area of the curriculum where learners need language input to help them carry out content tasks, plot out the language, make a decision about how to give the learners the language, produce a resource with this language embedded in it and then arrange for a lesson where both teachers are present to pilot the material they have just made to see how it works in practice.

Victory cross on the Asturian flag

Even before I’d left, Gilberto, Pilar and I were talking about areas for development of the already successful programme.  One particular area of concern expressed by one teacher very well during a workshop is ‘lack of confidence’ in English.  We talked briefly about how teachers can gain this confidence.  Pilar and Gilberto are instrumental in taking their teachers to native speaker contexts, to do job shadowing, to attend training courses in the UK and Canada so there are many opportunities for teachers to get exposure to the language.  There are also courses in language for teachers working through the meidum of English.  This reminds me of the Malaysia project which has a course of language for Science and Maths teachers.  This may be a useful model to explore for Asturia.  Secondly, there may be a useful role for setting up mechanisms for teachers to peer observe and peer mentor.  In a country where there is little readiness to open classroom doors to external observation (these are the teachers’ words, not mine) this may be a good development offering teachers who lack language confidence to have a sensitive friendly colleague observe for specific purposes (language for classroom management, for example) in order to feed back in to the language development of the teacher being observed.  The other area I would like to try and get involved in with this project given its scale is to work with small groups of subject teachers mixed with English teacher colleagues and look specifically at embedding language in tasks in the subject classroom.  There is definitely a role for the language teachers to help in this process given their language training and knowledge.  All it needs is a push of the button to set the process in motion.

I also learned that the bagpipes are one of Asturias’ national musical instruments and both Gilberto and Pilar advised me on what music I should buy while in Oviedo, I couldn't find what they suggested at the airport shop, but I did get 'NACai - Gatos del Fornu' which is great.
Not only was the trip very motivating from a professional point of view, just to see what has been achieved, and to consult with colleagues dealing with the daily grind of making it happen, I think I made some friends into the bargain!

Hope they ask me back again.


PPT on resource management for CLIL is below
PPT on secondary assessment is below
PPT on language awareness for CLIL is below
PPT on the bilingual programme in F Vallin School is below
 

New CLIL book from Asturias
Colleagues in the Asturian CLIL teachers' network have published a book of resources and teachers' notes for CLIL.

The education unit page has been altered, but there's plenty of news at their website: You can access the relevant page here

What you'll find in the resources (note - a zipped folder of the entire collection is given at the link at the foot of this page):

ART. UNIT: "Observation".

NATURAL SCIENCE (BIOLOGY). Unit: "Vertebrate animals".

CITIZENSHIP. Unit: "Human rights".

GEOGRAPHY AND HISTORY. Unit: "Greek civilization".

MATHEMATICS. Unit: "3-D shapes".

MUSIC. Unit. "Sound and its properties".

PHYSICAL EDUCATION. Unit: "Outdoor activities".

PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY. Unit: "Work and energy".

TECHONOGY 1. Unit: "Electricity".

TECHONOGY 2. Unit: "Technical materials".

The file itself is a ZIP folder and is about 78 MB

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

I gave the opening keynote at the CLILVoc Conference today at the KPH - University College of Education in Linz, Austria.
I promised to make my slides available, so here they are linked.
My talk was a 'state of the art' of CLIL in Austria over the 5-year life span so far of the CLIL in-service training course at the PH Wien.
More news to come!

 

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!

The British Council organized a very busy programme of events in Bahrain.
The idea was to interact with a wide network of teachers and trainers on the topic of content and language integrated learning.
We met hundreds of colleagues in meetings spread over two days,
Nov 7th-8th, 2007.

Day 1, Wednesday Nov 7th

Christina Phelps (Christina.Phelps@britishcouncil.org.bh) our host at the British Council in Bahrain set up a meeting with curriculum specialists at the Bahraini Ministry of Education chaired by English Language Specialist Dr Minas. There were 16 participants from a range of subject areas from Science through English to Commerce and Engineering.  We gave a generic presentation on Science Across the World, an outline of the Young Ambassadors of Chemistry project and an outline of CLIL issues and theory. 


MoE Curriculum Specialists

We had the delightful experience of meeting a colleague who was already familiar with Science Across the World.  Dr Fatan, curriculum specialist for Chemistry, informed us that in fact Bahrain was the first country in the programme in the Middle East joining in 1997.  Dr Fatan also told us that the Ministry would like to reintroduce the programme in schools in Bahrain.  Madina Hasan Taha, Head of Science and Technical Studies, was specifically interested in CLIL training for teachers working through the medium of English.

British Council Teaching Centre cosmetics workshop

Lida mixing her chemistry

This was a practical workshop for BC TC teachers.  14 colleagues participated.  There was a lot of interest from the teachers in the practical workshop and its applicability to their teaching.  For me it was great to see teachers who are already very busy giving time for voluntary training.

This is potentially an area BC TCs around the world might like to develop.  It would be good to see such an influential institution for language learning adopting a broad practical approach to language education.

=13.3333339691162pxpotions and lotions

In this workshop colleagues created their own line of cosmetics in groups and prepared a one minute marketing advertisement to 'sell' their products to the group.  The best products and presentations got prizes.

EFL Professionals group launch





Christina Phelps of the British Council gets us under way

This was the launch meeting of the EFL Professionals Group at the Directorate of Training of the Bahraini Ministry of Education.  

Dedicated colleagues turn out for the launch of the EFL professionals group.

16 colleagues participated and we focused on Science Across for cross-curricular project work...

Lida demonstrates flashmeeting

...giving the background to the programme and focusing on flash-meeting and communication in project work.

Day 2 Thursday Nov 8th

Meeting with senior teachers of English

Lida invites the world to her house in Amsterdam

45 teachers participated, Science Across – from the perspective of cross-curricular project work for English classes, we looked at the tasks in the Exchange Forms, the students’ pages, the content and language integration.

Bahraini senior teachers of English

Communications department of the Bahrain Institute of Technology

'Communication' is the focus of the work of English teachers at the Bahrain Institute of Technology... so we thought that producing and marketing a line of cosmetics in a one minute commercial was just the ticket for these colleagues...

with the face cream, the more you whisk it the better the cream... the oil particles break down into ever smaller droplets producing a smoother cream...

pink is always popular

team work is the name of the game... delegating roles makes sense when you're against the clock...

Lida brings the main chemical ingredients, but local colleagues provide all the rest of the materials needed... bottles, jars, spoons, water, colouring, perfumes...

Jaffa, our host, makes a funnel to be able to get his cosmetics product into a small bottle

...the Natureen group produced a very attractive line of cosmetics...

...and the presentations were very good, as you might expect from communications specialists!

...but it was the team with the snappiest, well-delegated, striking commercial which won our prize...

...visuals helped...

...Paradise Sensation...

...Everlasting Gulf...

Outcomes:

- We worked with 103 colleagues from all levels of education including teachers, trainers, inspectors and advisors over the two days.
- Free membership was offered to Science Across the World to all participants
- Science Across the World offers a mechanism for the British Council initiative to link schools in the UK with schools in the Middle East.  The programme guides schools in curriculum linking.
- A number of invitations were received to return to Bahrain to deliver similar training for the MoE in areas including English for vocational subject teachers.
- BC TC teachers were given a taste of practical work in the English language classroom.
- A teachers' network was launched with a CLIL / Science Across the World theme.

The British Council organised a CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) fact-finding mission to Bahrain (http://www.britishcouncil.org/me-zbahrain-contact-us.htm), Sunday 25th to Tuesday 27th February 2007.  

The visit was part of the regional project for improving the teaching of English and building networks of English language teachers.  Within this remit there is a lot of interest in the region in CLIL among the English language teaching community and a number of initiatives in the content teaching community which would benefit from such a visit.

Bahrain Content and Language Integrated Learning

The British Council organised a CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) fact-finding mission to Bahrain (http://www.britishcouncil.org/me-zbahrain-contact-us.htm), Sunday 25th to Tuesday 27th February 2007.   The visit was part of the regional project for improving the teaching of English and building networks of English language teachers.  Within this remit there is a lot of interest in the region in CLIL among the English language teaching community and a number of initiatives in the content teaching community which would benefit from such a visit.

Anne Wiseman (anne.wiseman@britishcouncil.org.bh), BC ELT Projects Manager, coordinated my visit to the region and Eilidh Hamilton (eilidh.hamilton@britishcouncil.org.bh), Senior Teacher Teacher Training, hosted my visit to Bahrain.

Min Ed School Teachers

Monday, 26th Feb, 2007.  A seminar was set up for MOE teachers.  There were 15 participants of which two were advisors from the Ministry of Education.  The seminar presented important questions to the group on integrating content with a foreign language, in this case English.  There was a lot of interest from the group, especially in terms of CLIL from an ELT perspective, resources and the Science Across the World programme.

The Ministry of Education here is investigating ELT CLIL and is piloting two language course books at the moment which may lead to developing more content input into language teaching in Bahrain.

BC TC Ts

There was a seminar organised for a small group of teachers from the British Council Teaching Centre in Bahrain.  The teachers were interested in the issues related to integrating content and language.  There was particular interest in Science Across the World and what this programme can offer to language teachers looking to bring more content into their language teaching.  These colleagues like the Science Year CD resources very much (www.sycd.co.uk). 

Outcomes and suggestions


There is interest globally from teaching centre teachers in Science Across the World.  I will make contacts with the Director of Science Across, Marianne Cutler, to suggest that we promote the programme specifically at the YLS level in British Council TCs for its potential in offering communication between groups of learners in different TCs around the world.  There was also some discussion of integrating BC activities with language work along the lines of the Climate Change CLIL initiative run by BC Poland. 

BC Poland have commissioned the Fields Studies Council UK to write English-medium climate change materials for secondary schools in Poland. The colleagues here will look into how these resources may be used in Bahrain and the region.  This makes a lot of sense and is a good example of joined-up thinking.  It’s great to see colleagues actually sharing really good materials and ideas rather than reinventing wheels again and again.

Good luck to colleagues in Bahrain, welcome to the FACTWorld family!!!

Third Brazilian Bilingual Education Conference

1 to 3 May 2009 
Sao Paulo, SP, Brazil

http://www.playpen.com.br

I was glad to be able to attend the third national bilingual conference in Brazil recently.

The school’s director gave an address in Portuguese and then we all stood to the Brazilian national anthem with its uplifting base drum, you could feel it along with the singing from the audience, raising the adrenalin of the group for what was to come.

Jim Cummins, introduced as ‘one of the giants of bilingual education’, gave the opening plenary ‘Bilingual and Immersion Programs: What can we Learn from 40 years of Research?’

It’s refreshing to have the opportunity once in a while to be able to listen to speakers like Jim Cummins.  His delivery is simple and at the level of the audience while at the same time dealing with the most important issues.

The conference was opened by Lyle French, the academic director of the school’s English programme who set the tone for the rest of the conference with a stress on bilingualism beyond English.

It's very refreshing to sit and listen to someone talk and feel that you agree with everything they are saying.
One of the messages was that there are so many diverse contexts where content and languages are integrated today that there can be no one method to suit all. He went on to describe a number of the different options, one of which being CLIL and stressed that the important thing is for local contexts to make choices which reflect their local needs.

It's a sign of the success of the school having such a prestigious line up of speakers.
Cummins stressed an approach which is based on key principles, two of which are scaffolding and starting with what the learners already know.

Please note - scaffolding is a core strategy according to Cummins which 'operationalizes the notion of the ZPD'. CLIL in practice is very much about making this theory real in the classroom, about thinking of how to produce and make this scaffolding available to our learners.

The flight via Zurich was practically a 24 hour block and not really having got much sleep, I spent much of the first day jet-lagged, possibly like the colleague in the middle of the picture opposite!  Thankfully, the first workshop in a room heavy with even the Autumn heat of Sao Paolo was buoyed by the interest of the group.

It did feel a little like ‘trying to teach your granny to suck eggs’ considering that the group was made up of teachers who work in one of the many bilingual programmes available in Brazil.  Having said that, there was a lot of interest specifically in the concept of language support which colleagues felt their learners need more and more but which is not provided in their textbooks.

Workshop 1 Summary

Is language being ignored in English-medium subject teaching?

This workshop:

- stresses the need for a language focus throughout the school curriculum;

- outlines issues for supporting language in content and presents language-supported content materials from junior and secondary;

- concludes with generic principles for CLIL.

Dr Garcia said many interesting things. In short: she avoids the term 'dual language', and ELLS, because this is a political move to avoid the term bilingual. She advocates using bilingual and bilingualism which are terms which have been wiped out during the Bush administration. Dual language suggests an equal divide, which is a suggestion of 50 – 50. Polydirectional is a term which recognizes the multiplicity of language in the classroom, although there may be many English, and Spanish in the classroom. Two-way bilingual schools with language A and language B, suggests that children have a mother tongue and they add another language to this. This simplifies the real linguistic complexity of children and communities. Students appropriate the use of language, if you sit and listen to what they are saying, they are continuously crossing between languages. So we think they are separate, but in the children’s lives they don’t separate them, they create a complex and growing repertoire of linguistic strategies – translanguaging.

Dr Garcia also gave some wonderful examples from real children in real classrooms, which is always a winner! These were examples of interaction between children in kindergarten where the children move between languages, teach each other, negotiate, conciliate in ways which separation of languages negates and ignores. Language is this negotiation.

Workshop 2

Science Across the World: CLIL in Action

(PPT handout here for download)

Summary:

Science Across the World is popular because of the opportunity it gives for communication and school exchanges.

This workshop:

- presents best materials;

- presents case studies of successful exchanges;

- outlines programme principles for integrating content and language;

- gives free subscription to workshop participants.

Carlos introducing my presentation on Science Across the World
Thanks to Macmillan for their sponsorship, free books to raffle.  It’s always nice to have things to give away to teachers.

Dr Anne Pakir an associate professor from the National University of Singapore spoke about the bilingual situation in Singapore where there are four official languages: English, Malay, Tamil and Mandarin Chinese. The government has chosen English, chose about 40 years ago actually, as the medium of instruction and business. Singaporeans are expected to become bilingual in English plus one of the other languages. Anne talked about how this may sound good on the surface, but actually the reality of ‘bilingualism’ in Singapore hides a much more complicated multilingual situation. Here again, there is this thread which ran through much of the conference that we are now in a period where just thinking of 'two separate languages' is out of date.

South America is not a homogeneous hispanic country!

Gives examples of ethnic minorities in Mexico where these groups are losing their linguistic identities to the dominant Spanish. Shows projects for placing the minority language at the centre of the curriculum.

How to deliver success:
1) Define and differentiate between bi-ed and intensive English

2) Have clear curriculum guidelines for both content and language

3) Content comes first language comes from content

4) Make big goals clear

5) Teacher qualifications should be in early childhood education and language acquisition

6) Value self-talk, forget repetition for production

7) Don't use the Dolch site word list at this age

I also attended a great presentation from Kristina Speakes (Escola Cidade Jardim / PlayPen) talking about Integrating Content and Language: Effective curriculums for bilingual preschools. I went as a father with a daughter aged one year and 9 months and so I was interested to hear what a specialist in bilingual education for the age range 3-6 has to say. I wasn't disappointed, and in fact Kristina's talk was applicable by and large at all levels of education. Common sense and sensible approaches. Some of them are listed here. The errors if there are any, are mine, not Kristina's.






Final thoughts…

I had the impression that there was a lot going on in bilingual education in Brazil. There is certainly plenty of information about this growth area on the internet. I’d assumed that there would be lots of examples of ‘how’ language and content are integrated. As it turned out, the teachers I met had similar issues to colleagues I work with in Europe. They write their own materials, by and large. They find that the published materials which they import from MT contexts are not ideal for their students and that they need to do a lot to adapt them to fit their learners’ needs. This meant that they were interested in CLIL. They were interested in finding specific examples of how to provide the ‘scaffolding’ referred to in Jim Cummins’ plenary.

Having said that, I also came away with the lesson that we’ve only just started chipping at this iceberg. Cummins, Garcia, Pakir made clear statements about the fact that we need to concentrate on languages and bilingualism beyond the compartmentalised separated ‘two language’ perspective (20th century). We need to think about a more dynamic relationship between languages and create a methodology which respects the very complex interaction (translanguaging) between the languages of our learners.

This has implications for CLIL in Europe, it suggests possibly that there is a role for more inventive MT use in the English-medium classroom. Garcia suggests a preview, view, review approach in which at each stage a different language may be used. Cummins suggests translation has a role in ‘publishing’ our students work in a way which reflects their true identities as bilinguals, or ‘becoming’ bilinguals.

I came away invigorated but a little anxious too. I feel that I still have a lot to learn about how two or more languages can work together in the curriculum in my context. I suspect that my colleagues teaching content and language successfully are ‘doing’ much of the things mentioned above, it’s just not written down in a methodology yet. I’m left with Dr Garcia’s message in my mind that we can no longer think of bilingual development from a monolingual perspective and that bilingualism is becoming a norm in many many places.

What then will be the reality of classroom practice in the future, let’s say a late 21st century classroom practice for education?

It’s likely to be one which is a methodology which not only pays attention and is aware of the diversity of language background in the classes we teach, but it will also be a methodology which ‘makes use’, which ‘exploits’ this aspect of the our learners’ group, celebrates it, publishes it and actively encourages learners’ awareness and identity as speakers of several languages.

Science Across the World - surely the best programme for publishing student work and developing their own sense of identity!

There is a sniff of interest in Young Ambassadors of Chemistry type events in Brazil. I'll certainly get my thinking cap on, talk to Lady Lida and see if we can't set something up.
Would be great to go back and work in some Brazilian schools.


 

Content and Language Integrated Learning in Brazil

We received a short report from the current director of English language projects at the British Council in Brasil on where content and language integrated learning is in Brazil, 04.10.07

Here at the British Council in Brazil, we are working to promote teacher development through online communities

http://www.britishcouncil.org.br/


 


 and resources for both language proficiency and methodological development teachers.



In terms of Content Learning in English, this is still incipient in Brazilian schools, but, increasingly, ELT professionals are seeking to use task-based and project-based approaches to learning. The Brazilian legislation in education highlights the importance of interdisciplinary work and transverse themes which run across the board of school subjects. These include cultural diversity, work, sexuality, environment, health and ethics.



On Brazil’s ELT Online Community there are many examples of cross-curricular projects, and The British Council is active in promoting sports, climate security, social responsibility, culture and science & technology.

If anybody would like to know more about ELT in Brazil and Latin America, please feel free to contact me.

Graeme Hodgson
Director English Language Brazil
British Council

SCN Quadra 4 Bloco B
Torre Oeste Conjunto 202
Brasília- DF 70710-926

T +55 61 2106 7500 / 2106 7515 (direct)
F +55 61 2106 7599

graeme.hodgson@britishcouncil.org.br

Back to School...

It was with great pleasure that I stepped back into the Prep class at the English/German School Plovdiv this year.

I've been sitting in my office busy writing stuff all this last year and was getting a bit of cabin fever from the isolation, so something had to be done.  With not a little concern about how much the students might have changed in the 5 years I've been absent, I went to ask the director if they would like me back on a part time basis.  Thankfully they said yes, and I've been going back for a day's teaching once every two weeks.

I have to say that it's the best thing I could have done.  I'm usually exhausted after the 6 classes (my colleagues do this everyday!), but am always thoroughly satisfied afterwards.  The students are great, and they are as enthusiastic and clever as ever they were.

It's not always easy to arrange time which suits the teachers, which fits in with the time I have to spare, but one day every two weeks has been manageable. 

Here's what we've been doing...

The colleagues in the 6 prep classes asked me to concentrate on the list of topics the students will be preparing for their end of year exams.  With this lengthy list, I chose topics which I was interested in and which I knew I could find materials for, and also which had an element of content and language integration.

D class

E class

J class

Z class

I class

K class

How much ice cream do you eat?

Ice cream data

(From the Science Across the World topic 'What did you eat?')
We started with eating and drinking habits and discussed the relationships between health and diet.
Of course, we started with ice cream, how much they eat and which countries they thought were the greatest consumers in Europe.
Why does Sweden eat so much ice cream?  One colleague from Sweden confided in me that it must be because ice cream is a leisure food and makes us think of our holidays.
We also did a class on Ireland.  We looked at famous Irish people, read a text about the life of Bono, and we sang a couple of Irish songs.  Here's one of them.

Molly Malone (In Dublin’s fair city)
 
In Dublin's fair city, where the girls are so pretty
I first set my eyes on sweet Molloy Malone
She wheeled a wheelbarrow, through streets broad and narrow
Crying: Cockles and Mussels, Alive, Alive O
 
Chorus: 
Alive, alive O, Alive, alive O
Crying, cockles and Mussels, Alive, alive O
 
She was a fishmonger, and sure ‘twas no wonder
For so were her Father and Mother before
And they all wheeled their barrows,
Through streets broad and narrow
Crying: Cockles and Mussels, Alive, alive O
(chorus)
 
She died of a fever, and no one to grieve her
And that was the end of sweet Molly Malone
Now her ghost wheels her barrow
Through streets broad and narrow
Crying: Cockles and Mussels, alive, alive O
(chorus)
 
(From Science Across the World topic 'What did you eat?')

We looked at disease.  The students read a linear text and transferred the information from it into a diagram.

The diagram is a tree diagram on its side, which leads on to a series of flow diagrams.

There's a short clip of this task in action. They read, they talk, they decide, they sort.

Road Safety

This is another topic from Science Across the World which is sadly no longer available from the website, but I still think it's very relevant today in Europe especially in Bulgaria.  The reason for this is that statistics show that while generally speaking over the last 8 years there has been a fall in the number of deaths and injuries from road traffic accidents, in Bulgaria and a few other countries there has been a rise.

Georgi Asparuhov was killed when he crashed his car at high speed and there are many other famous Bulgarians who have been involved in similar accidents some accidents alcohol-related.  We read about these tragic deaths and crashes and discussed how safe it actually is on the road in Bulgaria.  There was an overwhelming consensus in the 6 groups that it is not safe.

My students all did a 'speed reaction test' which comes from the Road Safety topic of Science Across the World.  This is no longer available on the programme website as an exchange topic, but you can download the old text for the topic from here - Road Safety.

The students had to catch a weighted card with markings for fractions of a second and a descriptor for each marking.  Some were 'safe on the road', others needed to 'be careful on the road'.

This is a clip of the task in action.
The EU has a scoreboard for safety on the roads
http://ec.europa.eu/transport/roadsafety_library/scoreboard/scoreboard.pdf
The document road death scoreboard.pdf is linked below.
There is also a lot of World Bank information for Bulgaria used in the PPT Road Safety linked below.

Road Safety Problem in Bulgaria

There is plenty of data here which shows that the situation in Bulgaria is getting worse.  There are many factors which explain why this might be so, the point for me in my lesson was that the students are potentially in danger and they should be aware of the danger.  Until drivers take more care, until the laws are observed, until people stop driving while under the influence of alcohol, the children have to take care of themselves.

Part of the text for this lesson can be found here below in the document - Road Safety Bulgaria.

Note - Dobri and I are offering to bring the rocket workshop to schools in Bulgaria. All you have to do is get in touch and agree a date with us and we'll bring all that is needed.

If you think your students would enjoy it, get in touch!

The Bulgarian English Teachers Association Conference
Veliko Tarnovo, April 2010
Rocket workshop


A dear colleague, Dobri Vetsov, and I gave a fun workshop at the BETA Conference recently in Bulgaria. Rocket building and launching!
Gracious hosts, American College Arcus

Veliko Tarnovo is a lovely place, perfect for a conference. Make sure you know where you're going. Even with a map marked with X we went the wrong way!

Dobri has done rocket launching at his school in Sofia during the school's annual science fair and we both think it's a great context for language learning. So we put in a proposal and off we went, enjoying the sites en route!

View from Hotel Panorama

I was with the perfect guide since Dobri had spent 5 years in VT as a student.

We gave Dan from Macmillan a hand with his baggage and immediately checked out potential launch sites.

Waiting for introductory speeches...

School coat of arms. Arcus is one of two schools offering IB courses in Bulgaria.

I was given a surprise by Zarina from the organizing committee. Could I translate for the Mayor of Veliko Tarnovo?

I did my best, but there was a moment I got lost... luckily Zarina jumped in to help! (Hats off to translators everywhere!)

David Hill stepped in for plenary speaker Tessa Woodward, volcano victim, and spoke on creativity in language teaching. David gave a huge plug for CLIL!

In the break Dobri took me round to visit his former host family in VT. Many thanks to Marin and Maria for the coffee and chocolates!

Dobri set the context of our workshop by describing the School Science Fair and how we wanted to share this wonderful activity with the world.

We prepared one single handout as this was intended to be a very practical session with little talk from us and all hands on from the participants. You can download the handout here with instructions and ideas for language focus.

The idea actually comes from Middlesex University who produced the rocket factory and notes on a range of different rocket making activities in class.

I think we should have asked for tables! Teams have 20 minutes to design and build the best rocket from paper, glue, coloured pens, rubber nose cones provided by us, and anything they think will make their rocket a winner.

They have to name their rocket and we called the Bulgarian air force to warn of low flying objects above Tarnovo. There were prizes for the best rockets measured according to a) design and b) flight time.

Then we launched in the school yard. Thankfully the rain held off.

If I'm lucky there are willing volunteers to provide rocket fuel!

Hard hats are a must.

Don't press that button yet!

What happens if I press the red button!?

Macmillan provided training DVDs, a copy of my Geography book, and two free subscriptions to onestop as well as free folders and pens for everyone who took part. Big thanks to Macmillan!.
Incidentally, there are loads of activities like this one on the website in the experiments section.

Talking with the local media afterwards about the importance of space exploration in Veliko Tarnovo...

We had two free subscriptions to onestopenglish.com to give to the best rockets and presentations.

Just to repeat, Dobri and I are offering to bring the rocket workshop to schools in Bulgaria. All you have to do is get in touch and agree a date with us and we'll bring all that is needed.
If you think your students would enjoy it, get in touch!

The Bulgarian English Teachers Association Conference

Rousse, March 30th - April 1st, 2012

The BETA Conference Programmes are made available here below. 

The Pre-Conference CLIL event programme is available here below.

There is a great programme on offer. We may be small, but the quality is guaranteed. We have John Clegg, Phil Ball, and 8 workshops to offer. Our product will be a book of CLIL tips and techniques for English teachers.

Hope to see you there!

Bulgaria - Beyond the Classroom Workshop

This is a series of workshops being given around Bulgaria organized by Macmillan publishers in Bulgaria. It's part of an ongoing series of teacher professional development which we're all very thankful to Yordan Stoyanov for his impeccable organization. Thanks Dan!

http://www.macmillan.bg/seminars.html


Getting beyond the textbook and the classroom.

We looked at the quesiton - What is a 21st Century Education?


This clip answers the question

The Beyond coursebook has a lot of stuff that it says goes 'beyond' the classroom. 
These include 'Learner-centred content', multiple learning methods enhanced by digital media and communication, developing 21st century skills through English, self-directed learning opportunities, allowing for active, high demand learning.

We gave some examples of each of these objectives in the coursebook.
And we considered arguments for going 'beyond' the coursebook.

I also brought some of my own ideas on this discussion.
I'm particularly interested in diverse methods for working with content.
By this I mean the teacher including input methods which cater for different learning styles in the classroom.

Within this discussion we looked at:

Activity types for different learning styles

Organizing vocabulary
Exploiting illustrations (and other visual media)
Using realia
Giving opportunity for ‘private talk’ and ‘public talk’
Creating and doing
Using sound and song
Giving opinions, feelings
Working with text

... and we considered examples for each.



Visually representing content with learners helps them learn the content in question.


We discussed the old maxim 'you can't test what you haven't taught' with an example from a maths exam.

You can see from the example above that the first part of the question carries a very low linguistic demand on the learner, whereas the second part demands a great deal in terms of language from the learner.
Teachers being aware of the demands they make on learners, precisely what they are asking learners to do is a key to successful learning outcomes. Sounds simple, but, it's true.

We looked at other visual inputs in the classroom and this took us to graffiti, street art, Banksy and the teachers creating their own graffiti using a task from the textbook.



The teachers were very creative!


example from teachers



graffiti art from teachers

We looked at life skills too. A major part of Beyond is teaching skills for the 21st Century.
Specifically, we looked at presentation skills but there is a whole lot more.

This eventually took us to TrashedWorld and students working with partners around the world to investigate their lifestyles and rubbish.

You can find out all about this on this site.

You can also download the whole slideshow if you're interested in Beyond and skills for life. 
It's quite a big file, so it's available in an external folder in box.net.

More soon!


 

This seminar has a bit of everything in it

Dec 12th, 2008, Sofia

The last Macmillan workshop for 2008 took place at the host school Saint Patriarh Evtimii on Friday Dec 12th 2008.
The workshop PPT can be downloaded from here at the bottom of the page.

As it was the last for the year, and we’d already run through most of the materials and ideas I had to offer in the previous 12 workshops, I decided to make this workshop a collection of good ideas and materials – a mixed bag of goodies for the holiday season to come.

Dan open the seminar with a few choice words.

Encouraging colleagues to participate in Macmillan's lesson share and win great prizes (www.onestopclil.com).

1 Lesson planning

Dan and I both thought it would be a good topic to cover in a workshop to have something on lesson planning.  This never came about, possibly because there was so much else to do.  In any case, we talked about good lesson planning, and I prepared a sample, as well as a template with guiding questions.  This is based on plans from colleague John Clegg.  The plans are simple and easy to follow and the whole focus of the plan is based around the language in the lesson, what the teacher says, what the student/s say/s.  It was also pointed out that Macmillan are offering good prizes for the best lessons which come in to their lesson share section of both onestopCLIL and onestopenglish.

2 Why learn another language?

Here, we had a short discussion around what motivates students to learn foreign languages.  What exactly do they say about this, what do students think about this question?

Among the many suggestions from colleagues were:
Parental pressure
University study
Travel abroad, to live, to work, to study
For communication with others outside the mother tongue
And many more...
Here’s one reason to learn another language if you’re a goldfish. 



There's also a parrot and a war veteran and you can download the text here at the foot of the page.



3 Accents

Lanky Joke

A favourite topic of mine in class is accent and dialect.  I always try my best to keep away from the Queen’s English, after all the students I work with will NEVER meet the Queen.  But they are very likely to meet Indian speakers of English, Chinese, Greek, Turkish.
... and you can listen to the recording here.


Coming from Lancashire it seemed apt to offer an example of lanky dialect, and I gave a mixed up joke (a pretty bad joke at that) about a man, the FA Cup and a parrot, colleagues had to follow the recording, then sequence the joke to reconstruct the text.



4 Stories
Bulgarian folk stories - Kose Bose
Mishmash animals
 
A few years ago I was involved in a project bringing content into the primary classroom and using children’s stories as a foundation for the content and language.  A product of the project was a story book in English, based on the traditional Bulgarian folk story about a blackbird and a fox.


I thought it was time to bring the story out of storage and share it with colleagues.  This story (teachers’ notes here below) covers a variety of content and language areas including names for different animals and one activity colleagues were asked to do was identify names for these ‘mishmash animals’.
 
I’m trying to use this story with my daughter at the moment, and she is interested for a short while, but frankly would rather we put the Winnie the Pooh DVD on.

5 The kids themselves
5.1 The Gift
I was introduced to this activity by Phil Dexter who was project manager in Bulgaria for a while.  It is a simple activity which is relevant at this time of year.  Ss are given a piece of paper, they draw a box in the bottom half.


The teacher gives out small slips of paper to the Ss to write their names on.  T collects them in, and hands them out to others in the class making sure that noone gets their own slip back.  With their sheet of paper, they should now draw a sketch of a gift for the person whose name they have and then write a short note briefly explaining why they think this person would like this gift.  Next is for Ss to get up and go and deliver their gift to the person whose name they got and sit down to wait for their own.  Once Ss have had chance to enjoy their gifts, they then write another note, a thank you note to the person who gave them their gift, deliver it, wait for their own to arrive.

5.2 New Year's Resolution
Another topic for this time of year deals with New Year’s Resolutions.  I have a cartoon from Calvin and Hobbes on this topic and after looking at that, participants were asked to make resolution hats.  This involves them writing down 5 promises to themselves for the New Year on separate strips of paper, then they stick the strips onto a hat they also have to make.  Then they wear the hats, stroll around read colleagues’ promises.  The hats make a wall display and then each week students are allowed to remove promises as they keep them, and throw them in the bin.



6 Survey work (mp3 recordings)
 
A firm believer that the best learning comes from the learners themselves, I try and make use of their language as input for learning for other learners and one way to do this is by recording them while carrying out surveys based on lives and behaviour of students in the class. If you have a simple mp3 player, it’s likely to have a microphone on it and you can easily record students in class, for use in the same class, or with other classes.


Extract from notes on survey work (full version is here below)

7 Moving about a bit

Chunks Charades – this comes from Tomalin and Stempelski and is just like the regular game but the difference is that you use full phrases and idioms instead of films, or famous people’s names.



8 Riddles and puzzles

I can’t remember where these came from, I think they were from Elaine Ratheram, a former colleague in Bulgaria and project manager.

Just a bit of fun and thought gymnastics, some funny, some terrible! All the riddles and answers are attached at a link below.

9 Reading the paper

It's good to have some chance to read extensively.  I used to subscribe to the Guardian weekly and make use of the old copies with my students in a number of ways.  Here, colleagues were asked to think about and discuss what they could do with a pile of British newspapers.  



My year 10 class from English German School, Plovdiv reading the Guardian

10 Kinaesthetic intelligence

Teaching is all about juggling.  Finally, I wanted to share this with colleagues because my own teaching career started by a student teaching me how to juggle, (20 years later…) and we had a discussion about how important it is to have opportunities for movement in the classroom, especially the intensive prep year classrooms in Bulgaria where students get 18 hours of English per week!
So, we juggled.  They were excellent students!


The world record is impressive and you can see that and many other clips if you do a search for ‘juggling records’ at YouTube, also look for ‘blind juggling’.

Many thanks to Macmillan for providing 4 prizes to give away in our draw at the end of the workshop.  Many thanks to these colleagues for making it a memorable afternoon.  All the best for the holiday period and see you all next year!
 

The International Year of Chemistry 2011
Global Stamp Competition: Chemistry as a Cultural Enterprise
Prize giving and celebration of winner of 12-14 age group: Vasilena Vasileva, Gorna Malina, Bulgaria
Nov 8th, 2011

It happens once in a while that you get to participate in a truly splendid educational moment. This is one for me. The whole of this event was about celebrating achievement in young people, applauding their efforts, and, well, having a bit of a party at the same time.


IYC Website


Hristo Botev School, Gorna Malina


Hristo Botev School Celebration 
Gorna Malina, Nov 8th, 2011

Lida is welcomed and treated with traditional banitsa and chubritsa.

BTV were there and interviewed Lida about the event, the prize and how Vasi's design was chosen. In fact, there were around 250 entries to the competition from 18 different countries, and the jury consisted of IUPAC members from around the world who had a difficult job to choose the winners.

We were welcomed with singing and dancing...

Greeted by the headmaster of the school, Kirilka (Vasi's English teacher), the inspector of chemistry as well as a representative from the Ministry of Education.

A familiar and wonderful sight in IUPAC activities, namely a busy productive classroom. The aim of the cosmetics workshop is to get students producing a range of three cosmetics products in their small groups. They have to produce shampoo, hair gel and face cream by following simple instructions. They also have to brand their products and think of a marketing campaign to 'sell' them. In the end the best design, the best chemistry, and the best sales pitch wins the prizes.

There have been a good many YAC events around the world. Lida and I took the programme to Argentina, to Russia, to South Africa, to Taiwan, to Korea and to Malaysia. Beyond our original project, the workshop went to many other locations around the world, always with the same aim: to get young people communicating about chemistry and explaining what they were doing to the passing public, explaining their enthusiasm for science to whoever is listening.

It was with this same spirit of enjoyment of science that we met in Gorna Malina, and I must say, it is worth all the effort which goes into the preparation, the time, and the getting there ! just to see the fun in the faces of the young people involved.



Jury choosing the winners

Vasi's original art work which was to become the basis for the stamp design.

Cosmetics winners!!!!

It turned out that Kirilka is a busy teacher, getting her students involved in no less than 5 international competitions throughout the year!

The mayor of Gorna Malina giving his address.

School headteacher receiving his Dutch present from Lida, 'I'll use it for tea', he says.

Vasi receives her official award and cash prize, well done Vasi!

School band plays us into celebrations

School dancers

Celebrations continue inside

There was so much more than just the events you can see in the photos above. It's enough to say that 'we celebrated science' in the best way possible, and that was by getting young people enthusiastic about it, by getting them 'doing' it and talking about it, and by raising their curiosity about what application there may be to the chemistry they are learning in their lessons every day.
Let me make an invitation to anyone reading this who thinks that their students might like to be involved in a similar event. 

What are you waiting for? 

Get in touch! 

Let's do it!

 

School Partnerships Project Meeting
Ezikova Gimnazia Plovdiv
May 26th, 2010
The Ezikova Gimnazia Plovdiv is part of a project proposal under the EU's Lifelong Learning Programme.    


The theme is:
Chemistry as a cultural enterprise

We organised a first meeting in our school of students and teachers for Wednesday May 26th, 2010.     
Will post updates on the project here.     

CLIL for Business, Economics, Marketing and Finance
 
I've carried out a number of events recently for teachers in small groups, in some cases with teachers just from a single host school. The content has been predominantly focused on the subject areas of Business Studies, Economics, Marketing, Finance and a number of others, but this has made me investigate these subject areas in detail and prepare a programme based on activities and resources from these subject areas. The schools are indication of recent growth in provision of curriculum teaching through English and the focus here is largely on professional and economic curriculum subjects, which, when you think about it is very sensible. Young people leaving school, or more commonly in these cases, go to work in an apprenticeship and return to school 2 or 3 days per week, more and more need English for the workplace.

I've brought together the schools I visited here firstly because they are all related, and secondly for ease of reference. Lower down the page, you will find two other things. You'll find the content I offered during the workshops and you'll also find the references to CLIL materials and activities for professional and vocational school subjects (business studies and economics, but many others).
 
- Grammar School for Economics and Tourism, Velingrad, Bulgaria



The tourism industry is definitely a strength in Bulgaria and the school offering subjects through English feeds this factor.

Colleagues from Professional Grammar School for Economics and Tourism in Velingrad.

- The Reuterschule, Kassel, Germany


The school has students returning from apprenticeships for upper school English-medium education in business studies, chemistry, physics and likely other subjects in the future if the 'bili' project takes hold and the school is able to find teachers.

- Lycee Jean Piaget, Neuchatel, Switzerland



The school offers learning through English and German foreign / second languages and the focus is a broad range of subjects including Biology, Maths, History, Sport, Arts, Geography, Philosophy, Economics.

- Berufsbildungszentrum Olten, Switzerland


A fascinating group with a direct professional skills focus as many students in the 'CLIL' classes are studying for social and health care professions amongst others and so study Chemistry, Maths, Technology, Philosophy, Psychology and they also study design, finance and insurance among many other subjects. This is a new initiative for these teachers and students and will be interesting to watch!
 
In short, the above is a clear sign of education systems incorporating an English-medium dimension, at least in these contexts but I would suggest in Europe more widely and this all certainly mirrors developments in Austria in recent years in the HTL (Technical High Schools) in providing an upper school education through English.
 

3D CLIL - Exploring the three dimensions of CLIL (concepts, procedures and language), considering the balancing of these dimensions in any given lesson.
01 Subject-Specific Vocabulary - Identifying, organizing, activating subject-specific vocabulary; looking at similarities and differences of SSV with other aspects of language in the CLIL classroom.
Themes and activities:
Accounting wordsearch
Population Pyramid cloze text
Job Specifications crossword
 
02 General-Academic Language - Making visible this invisible aspect of the language of learning; embedding GAL in CLIL activities
Themes and activities:
The Language of Business Meetings (sorting phrases according to purpose)
Company Graphs (movement language in graphs)
PEST Analysis (key language)
BCG Growth-Share Matrix (language for characteristics of growth)
Linear Equations in Accountancy (describing linear and non-linear equations)
 
 
03 Guiding Input - Working with Media: Looking at the wide range of media input used in the CLIL classroom (PPT, video, animation, images, live talk, realia, posters); identifying content structure in media content; exploiting content structure to create instruments for guiding input; embedding language within content structures with a view to supporting output
Themes and activities:
Purchasing Process - using a flow chart to guide students through a description of a process
Product Life Cycle - describing product life cycle graphs
Marketing Mix - characteristics of the 4Ps (using an introductory video to identify 4Ps)
Project Contexts - using a mindmap to sort key principles related to projects
Simple Interest - creating board games for calculating simple interest
Secondary Economic Activity - Matching descriptions to steps in the process of secondary economic activity
 
 
04 Guiding Input - Working with Text: Looking at a range of text activities through word-level, sentence-level; text-level; supra-text level activities; shared reading and discussion; writing activities based on content structure found in text to promote discussion through shared reading in pairs/threes
Themes and activities:
Company Graphs - matching text descriptors to branch graphs
Stakeholder Management - Matching cells with text in three columns to create accurate descriptions
Criminal Law - Jigsaw reading for gathering key information on roles and duties of participants in criminal trial
Insurance - Dominoes game for matching terms with definitions
Job Specifications - Sorting texts into categories for job candidate
Project Management - Defining 'project' versus 'business as usual' by sorting descriptors
 
Supporting Output - Writing in CLIL: considering the provision of a variety of writing support (substitution tables, sentence starters, word lists, gapped texts, writing frames); creating substitution tables for specific content writing; group writing
Themes and activities:
Company Progress - Describing causes and effects on progress with substitution tables
Advertising and Public Relations - Writing sentences about marketing and PR from 3 table columns then checking what is written by reading text
Marketing - Comparing marketing practices past and present with a writing frame
Project Management - producing text paragraph by completing jumbled sentences into a logical whole
 
Supporting Output - Speaking in CLIL: examining speaking activities in terms of fluency and / or accuracy; paired/group speaking activities; developing information-gap speaking into content materials; getting everyone talking in class
Themes and activities:
Company Progress - Paired information gap speaking using gapped text (same text but different gaps)
Financial Accounting - Basic information to do with financial accounting arranged into 3 things you know and 3 things you want to know for an 'information search'
Boston Consulting Group (BCG) Growth-Share-Matrix - Describe and draw (one student describes a graph, the other reproduces it by listening and drawing)
Company Organization - Brainstorm in groups the structure with mindmap, present to class
Insurance - Use 'spot the difference' images of car crash to create info gap speaking
Marketing - create a question loop of basic facts and ideas to do with marketing, students ask and answer questions to find all the missing information
Product Life Cycle - do a describe and draw to produce a product life cycle graph (one student describes, the other draws)
Sales Contracts - pairs rearrange parts into a dialogue and then act it out
 
Networking and follow-up - colleagues working in teams; finding and creating matierals and storing them; connecting with groups in other countries; developing a 'department' identity for CLIL in school; creating a biblio of books in school
Themes and activities:
Purchasing Process - using a flow chart to guide students through a description of a process
Product Life Cycle - describing product life cycle graphs (movement language in graphs)
Marketing Mix - characteristics of the 4Ps (using an introductory video to identify 4Ps)
Project Contexts - using a mindmap to sort key principles related to projects
Simple Interest - creating board games for calculating simple interest
Secondary Economic Activity - Matching descriptions to steps in the process of secondary economic activity
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Communicating Science in Bulgaria, 25 – 29.3.2005
 
As part of initiatives to promote Science Communication in Bulgaria the British Council organised a Play Science Festival at the Sofialand pleasure park in Bulgaria’s capital, 25.3.2005. 

Sofialand, Bulgaria

School teachers and students from all over Bulgaria came together for a day’s science activities including Science theatre, Science rap, a Science fashion show, posters on Science projects from participating schools, practical Science experiments and also representatives from British Science communication projects from the University of the South West of England.

My contribution, when Lufthansa finally brought my luggage, was rocket building and launching with children of all ages and sizes in the grounds of the Sofialand complex. 


The Science activity day is an example of the wonderful work that the British Council in Bulgaria is carrying out in the popularisation and communication of Science.


Lyubov Kostova, lyubov.kostova@britishcouncil.bg, Science Manager at the British Council, also has a background in PR and it shows in the events I have seen organised with her participation.


The Sofialand venue was perfect for such a Science popularisation event with children demonstrating their projects all around the complex on a ‘drop-in’ basis to the public. At the same time, Ian Stewart, BC Director, and representatives from the Ministry of Education said a few words of welcome to the gathered crowds.

Communicating Science Education, Bankya, Bulgaria, 28-29.3.2005
 
In collaboration with the Ministry of Education and Science, the British Council organised a workshop for 30 regional inspectors and experts of Physics and Chemistry Education from around Bulgaria. The focus of the workshop followed the theme of the Play Science Festival and looked at developing communication in Science, particularly Physics and Chemistry in Bulgaria. Colleagues were presented with examples of initiatives of Science popularisation activities from around the world and were given an introduction to Science Across the World, www.scienceacross.org.

Lida Schoen (amschoen@xs4all.nl) Chemistry teacher trainer from the Netherlands, ran a workshop on cosmetics where colleagues had to produce a line of hair gel, shampoo and bath salts and then present their products to the group during dinner on the first evening. The winners won a chunk of Dutch cheese. 
 
Despite the heady smell of perfumes wafting around the seminar room, we didn’t pass out and lines of cosmetic products were concocted secretly around the room, colleagues hiding their ideas and techniques for marketing their products. 
 
This event is a significant meeting for this network of colleagues who play a role in advising practising teachers of Chemistry and Physics around Bulgaria. It is significant because the workshop took place in Bulgarian with Stefka Kitanova providing running translation where necessary and this brings the Science Across the World programme with communication at its heart to a wider educational community in Bulgaria. 

Poster advertisement for cosmetics line

Elka Zlatkova, Expert for Physics for the region of Sofia, has suggested organising a workshop based on the Physics-related Science Across the World packs for teachers in the Autumn. Colleagues from other Bulgarian towns and cities also discussed incorporating the programme into their Science festival activities in the Autumn. 

On day 2 colleagues were awoken with another practical activity involving rocket design and construction and, since they were all Physics experts, they were given the task of identifying a means of calculating the altitude of the flight of their rockets during the launching of the rockets. The answer is found in simple trigonometry, of course!!!!, where colleagues stand 30m from the launch site and using a protractor prepared with a string and weight they measure the angle created and calculate the height (T = O/A). The best rocket flew for 7 seconds and was designed with a Bulgarian and EU motif indicating a positive future which everybody liked a lot!! 

Session 2 involved colleagues carrying out a cluster discussion looking at the Science Across the World programme and the benefits it could offer teachers in Bulgaria, as well as the challenges teachers would face should they be interested in joining up. Comments were rich and varied and in the afternoon the same activity fed into a discussion on how these advisors could support the process of developing communication in Science in Bulgarian schools using the Science Across the World programme. 

Ian Stewart and the British Council in Sofia hosted the afternoon’s activities in their multimedia room and colleagues were shown resource websites for Science as well as the Science Across website and possibilities for teacher development under the Comenius and Grundtvig programmes.

In preparing their action plans, the advisors offered very clear and concrete suggestions for following up on this short but intensive and fruitful two days.


Some of these included:
•integrating Science Across the World into the ‘Man and Nature’ project which is being implemented in Bulgarian schools to students aged 10 to 13.
•Offering Science Across the World and similar Science Communication activity at the ‘Science on Stage’ festival in Pleven, Bulgaria on September 22-23 later this year.
•Beginning a train the trainers programme based on the Science Across the World programme and everything it offers for Communicating Science. In this way, the advisors could cascade their knowledge to the Science teaching profession in Bulgaria.
•There was considerable interest in translating more of the Science Across packs into the Bulgarian language to make the programme as accessible as possible to teachers.
•There was a clear desire to see that this meeting is just the beginning of workshops focusing on Communicating Science.


The group of Science advisors was a delight to work with. The colleagues were very receptive and participated wholeheartedly in the activity. They also raised some very useful issues for discussion which placed the development of Communicating Science in the reality of the Science classroom in Schools in Bulgaria.

Both Lida and I are looking forward to future opportunities for working with them again.

(The report of the event can be downloaded below)

This seminar was delivered in Pleven

Who made this pile of rubbish?

Don't be surprised by the title above and on our homepage. This was a quality workshop. We just used a lot of rubbish to talk about culture. It's actually an activity from Science Across the World and fantastic fun where you get your students to exam bags of rubbish and write / draw a profile for the person who made the rubbish.

It was one of the last hot days of Autumn in Bulgaria. At around 28 degrees, we won't see temperatures like this until next July, June if we're lucky.

It was with such energy that a group of teachers got together at the Ivan Vazov Secondary School in Pleven for a workshop sponsored and organized by Macmillan in Bulgaria through the very reliable person of Yordan Stoyanov.

Map of the workshop contents (pdf linked below)

It was actually the last of 18 workshops which Macmillan asked me to deliver over the course of the last year and a half. We were going to do this one in June, but it just wasn't physically possible. As it turned out, one of the teachers said that this is a much better time of the year for such a meeting anyway.

I won't repeat all of the content of the workshop here as it's pretty much the same as the workshop held in Plovdiv and Sofia this year. If you're interested you can take a look at those pages on this site.

If you'd like more information about the tasks and materials, just write to me and I'll be glad to send you them.

I got the chance to catch up with colleagues I'd worked with before, and there was some discussion about how we might create more opportunities for teachers in Bulgaria to get together at these kind of meetings to share ideas, catch up and talk about issues related to their work.

One suggestion was that we do it ourselves. Well, I'm game. The colleagues from Gabrovo expressed an interest in hosting a meeting for teachers from their region. I think I'd have to drag Krastina and Dara along with me for a weekend. It's a lovely part of the country.
There is certainly a need for ongoing opportunities for teacher development in Bulgaria. The numbers of teachers who turned out over the course of the last year and half vouch for that.

Many many thanks to Macmillan, and in particular to Dan for his hard work in organizing all these events. If anybody ever needs an organizer, call Dan, he's your man!

Dan and I have already been talking ideas for future initiatives.



 

Teaching Culture with a small 'c'
Plovdiv, Feb 6th, 2009

26 teachers came together to a workshop on the theme of "teaching culture with a small c' today in Plovdiv, Bulgaria.
Many thanks to the seminar hosts at the Humanities Grammar School 'Saints Kiril i Metodii' (http://www.ghp-plovdiv.org/)
I always enjoy venues like this one - Humanities Grammar School 'Saints Kiril i Metodii'. 


The security guard on the door enthusiastically informed me as we waited for the materials to arrive that the school has a number of famous graduates and former students as well as other big names in Bulgarian history come through its doors, including Vasil Levski himself.

It was a perfect fresh and sunny winter's day for the workshop and the photo of the school building!

Dan, Macmillan rep, gets us started

The group was very interactive and enthusiastic and included mainly English teachers, but also one psychology teacher and a head teacher of a new centre in the town of Velingrad for education in tourism who was looking for ideas and input in an English-medium training initiative for her own staff.

The programme was the same as that offered at an earlier seminar on the same theme in Sofia and included all aspects of culture NOT including literature, art, architecture and the classics.  This workshop is about people, behaviour, attitudes and symbols and icons of everyday life.

Examining culture in a bag of rubbish

I made a point of stressing to participants that if they want to find a resource bank of materials and ideas for examining culture in their classrooms, they need look no further than Science Across the World. 

Quick it's still free to join! (www.scienceacross.org)

Presenting a profile of the person who created the rubbish

I made new contacts at the workshop, will be visiting some new schools in Plovdiv in the near future.

Thanks again to the school and Macmillan for the opportunity and the free copy of the Science VPS book and CD they provided for the lottery at the close of the seminar for one of the teachers to take home.

It was a warm and welcoming group in Plovdiv, perhaps that's why it's my home town.

 

Teaching Culture with a small 'c'
Macmillan seminars in Bulgaria,  Sofia, Friday October 3rd, 2008

This seminar looked at the area of culture with a small ‘c’.  Participants looked at culture which has nothing to do with Shakespeare, nothing to do with Milton, nothing to do with great architecture and nothing to do at all with the Royal Opera.
This seminar looked at the culture of everyday life and the curriculum, how we can exploit the curriculum to investigate the lives of the children we teach.  Participants looked at a little theory and then encouraged to do a lot of practice into bringing the real world of the everyday lives of our children into the classroom.

We're grateful to our host school, Sv Patriarh Evtimii, Sofia

These are the areas we covered (pdf available below)

We looked at cultural symbols important used in an advert:
Hovis  - 'as good today as it's always been'.

Some of the significant 'symbols' we identified were:

Set in the past
Regional accent for delivery boy turned man retelling story
‘Get it inside you boy’
Town houses
Cobbled street
Bicycle delivery
Freewheeling downhill
Thatched roofs
Tea pot
Standard BBC accent
Fresh loaf, freshly cut
As good today as it’s always been
 
Old Hovis ad - you can find the original on YouTube - (click the pic)
 
Ultimately these are the things that hook the customer and sell the product.  Colleagues were asked to watch the clips and note any cultural symbols using the frame in this link.

We looked at another advert for the same product, but a modern version

Some of the symbols identified were:

Set in the past
There you go lad
Young boy sent shopping for bread
Horse drawn cart
Suffragettes protest – 1915?
Marching soldiers
Bombed house
Homeless family
Churchill’s speech – June 4th 1940
Old radio
Spitfire
Street party (and all the stuff that entails) – 1952?
Lemonade
Miniskirt – 1965?
England football fans in car – 1966
Immigrants
Strikers v polics – 1984?
Ay, lad, innit past your bed time? (regional accent)
Fireworks, – millennium?
Is that you home love? (regional accent)
Fresh loaf, freshly cut
As good today as it’s always been
 
New Hovis ad - you can find the original on YouTube (click the pic) 


We looked at cultural products such as memories and personal souvenirs.  I wrote a lesson in my first year in Bulgaria called 85 Reasons to Love Bulgaria which is linked here below (Bulgaria had just come 4th in the World Cup).  There was and still is a lot of negative feeling about Bulgaria among Bulgarians and sometimes people forget what the good things are and it's a good opportunity to get students talking about likes and dislikes.
If you use this, and you get students to write their own lists about their home countries, send us a copy and I'll upload them here.


We looked at culture in everyday life through the topic of Domestic Waste, which is one of my favourite Science Across the World topics at the moment.

Here students are asked to examine a bag of rubbish and make a profile of the person who made the rubbish.  It takes some organization to get together 7 bags of rubbish, but well worth the effort as the task is great.


Colleagues present their waste person profile

Macmillan rep, Dan, lends a hand

From here, we moved on to cultural behaviour.  The example I took was Xmas in England and I used a task from the cultural studies project in Bulgaria from a number of years ago. 
The task I gave was based on the photograph here and a listening I did where I talked about my own memories of Xmas as a boy in England and how similar or different it was compared to the picture.  So, students look at the picture and listening to the audio recording (YouTube clip of the recording) and note Yes or No based on what they hear about the characteristics of xmas given in the picture.


How typical is your Xmas?  (the pdf of the image is available at a link below)


A follow up task can be to get students to survey their own class, and compare with other groups in their school.  You can see results from a survey I got my students to do which included 5 groups of 26 or 27 students.  It's in a word document linked below. The results are very interesting for me personally, but it also gives students the opportunity to look at and talk about information to do with real people, which is what makes it interesting (... we're all curious about other people...).

Science Across the World is a great project for investigating culture.  This is quite surprising as the project coordinators weren't aware that they have created a programme for investigating culture.  They thought they were setting up an initiative for Science education exchanges, which it does. 
The project goes further in offering teachers and students instruments for investigating their own culture, investigating the culture of others, seeing how others see their own culture and seeing how other cultures see themselves.  All of these are essential ingredients for intercultural communicative competence.

Take a look (www.scienceacross.org) while you still can!


Fantastic group of teachers to work with, turned up after school hours, of own volition, lots of input, and they keep coming back!

We ran out of time at this point, though there were other areas to cover such as the culture of gestures, and investigating stereotypes.
I did find time to talk a little about the course we'll be running in Plovdiv in July 2009 which is going to cover much of the above and also prepare teachers for setting up schools links and partnerships and apply for funding through Comenius / Grundtvig.  


I enjoyed the workshop myself very much.  It is an area I haven't worked in for a long time and it was good to refresh my ropey knowledge.  The colleagues were very much into the material as well.
Thanks to Macmillan for setting it up, and for offering the Vocabulary Practice Series book and CD as a prize in our draw at the end.

I look forward to the next workshop.

DNA Models Exhibition, Natural History Museum, Sofia, March 2004

In March 2004, dear colleague Stefka Kitanova sent this message to the factworld yahoogroup:

Dear All,
1. the exhibition of DNA models is now at the National Natural History Museum
and the official ceremony will be on 18 March at 2.30 pm - please feel
invited - those who can - those who cannot - will se photos and read info
2. Anna Tecau form Romania - please mail ME the full list of your Student
who took part - in order not to make mistakes in the certificates
3. Yesterday was the Spanish step 1 in SAW in BG - more - tomorrow - today
is a day for rest!
best Sunday rest day wishes
Stefka
 

I've been meaning to create an online exhibition of this wonderful work ever since.

As teachers we try hard to create audience for the work of our students.  The sheer logistics of organising a competition for creating models of DNA from all manner of materials and to have entries from all over the world coming by post makes me wince!

But there you go, Stefka is that kind of teacher.  It's taken me a while to get these uploaded but here are the pieces of DNA artwork which came from all over the world and Stefka had exhibited at the Natural History Museum in Sofia, Bulgaria.

My favourite has to be Pizza DNA.  Long may there be teachers like Stefka to make events like this happen!



   '



I've created a flickr album with the complete collection of art. If you're interested in organizing a similar activity for your students. Get in touch - keithpkelly@yahoo.co.uk, we'd be glad to help!

Returning Alumni Talks
Talk 1 - Maksim Baldzhiev

Communications and Languages
English-German Grammar School
Feb 10th, 2010

It was a great pleasure to have Max back in school.
Obviously a communicator, Max used a few slides as visual context to his informative and amusing talk.
Quite a traveller, Max had plenty of stories to tell

and tried very hard to interact with the 100 or so students listening to him

and me too

the results were very impressive

and there was great interest

particularly to hear about succes, work, fun

music

and how Max manages to integrate his busy work and life schedule with family and love

You can see Max talking on languages at this YouTube link.

Max talked using the following headings and structure. Prep students had a handout to help them make notes and were given a follow-up task to retell back in class what they had heard:
1) Education
2) Languages 
3) Work
4) Communications
5) Success 
6) Free time / fun 
7) Your questions 

Preparatory Class, EDS Plovdiv, 2008-2009

A lesson preparing for the oral exam - preparing an 1-2 minute

introduction about yourself.

June 10th, 2009

A minute on your self
I was asked to take lessons with the Prep class in my school recently with a focus to help them prepare for their oral exam.
 
I've been working with them all year on potential topics for the exam, but this class was to actually practice a section of the exam. My colleagues informed me that the students would be expected to give a short introduction about themselves, between one and two minutes. The aim of this is to get them 'into the flow' before the dialogue they would be expected to carry out with a partner in the exam.

1 Just a minute
http://youtu.be/vOaIUXsLWq4 
Play clip - what kind of a show is it?
 
I played a clip from the BBC show called 'Just a minute'. If you don't know the show, go take a listen, hilarious is the best word to describe it. I asked the students to listen and try to guess from what they could hear what kind of show it was. There are many clips from the show on YouTube, like this one.
 
They eventually get round to comedy quiz and I explain the rules of the show which are basically to talk on a topic for a minute with 'no hesitation, no repetition, no deviation'.

2 Talk for two minutes about yourself without stalling
 
Example: Myself giving an introduction about myself
 
But there were actually a couple of topics I don't get round to talking about and students had to listen and say which topics weren't mentioned.

Topics I noted down to help me thing were:
 
friends and family
work
travel
music
daughter
food
house

You can listen to the recording here.

3 Make a short list of key ideas for preparing to talk about yourself.
 
4 Pair up and give your two minute talk while your partner keeps an eye on the watch and an ear for you stalling, make a note if you hear any significant hesitation.
 
5 Volunteers to be recorded.

I asked students to make a list of topics they would feel confident to talk about regarding themselves. I then walked around and asked two or three students to have a go while I stood there with my stopwatch timing them for a minute. There are recordings of a number of the attempts at this link.
I gave feedback about timing and topic.

6 Try it as a game with two teams (hand out paper slips for team members to write their names on so that you can chose people according to their names in each team one after the other)
 
I collected in the name slips and piled them on my desk so that I could pick people at random and we played just a minute.

Zlatarski International School at the European Parliament
The Euroscola on 27th March 2009, Strasbourg
A teacher’s diary
By Lyubov Dombeva

Day 1 - Wednesday 25th March 2009

Early morning before dawn, cold wind carry drifting snow when the bus takes off from Sofia to Strasbourg. Before we know it, it’s time for border control at Kalotina. Quick check and we’re allowed to Serbia. Short stop for refreshments and the sun smiled at us for the first time. Sleepiness was gone and we’re happy to listen to our guide telling us the story of the lands we cross from ancient times to the most recent history.
We crossed over 700km that day, but in jokes, talks and songs with friends it didn’t feel much.
First night stop in Zagreb. Lovely city and we pity we had no time enough to visit more of its beautiful sights. This is just one more reason to come back again to this beautiful country and its cheerful people. But we have to rest well now as more roads await us tomorrow.


Day 2 - Thursday 26th March 2009

Another early morning start, but the sky was bright and the feeling was optimistic as we began the ride. Soon we crossed the border with Slovenia and once again we traveled through the EU. No more border control for us until we attempt to leave Hungary on the way back home.
The smooth road and the short night rest had their say when the bus rocked everyone to sleep. The team had never been so quiet before but it only lasted for couple of hours.
We woke up from the cries of awe at the sight of the magnificent Alps covered in snow and wide awake we started an enthusiastic photo session.
We crossed from Slovenia to Austria through a 7km tunnel under the mountain. More snowy mountains and fog awaited us in Germany.
Along the way, crossing now the plains of Germany we encountered a technological miracle - a self-cleaning WC that starts spinning to a brush when you wave a hand to the motion sensor.
Several hours later we were stuck in a traffic jam upon entering Stuttgart. Felt like ages.
Late in the evening we finally arrived at Strasbourg, France. Left the luggage in the rooms and wandered the empty streets around the hotel to find a restaurant for dinner. In the first one we saw inside a cheerful group of people who waved us through the windows to enter and join them for some salsa dancing. Hmm, a tempting offer but no, thanks, we were hungry. Few blocks away at a cozy Lebanese restaurant we found what we were looking for.



Day 3 - Friday 27th March 2009 - the Euroscola day

At 8 am twenty five sharp dressed young ladies and gentlemen went downstairs for breakfast, 8.30 we were already in front of the European Parliament. A bit surprised that the other delegations were not dressed so formal we all agreed that none the less we were the most impressive team!
After the detailed check at the entrance, we were led inside the Parliament’s building. Then the students had to choose which of the six working groups to join and here students and teachers were separated. What happened to them after this moment is a story they should tell.
As for us, we had a working breakfast with teachers from 19 other countries and a guided tour around the European Parliament’s building. Its architecture is impressive with the way it uses space, light and art. And although very official it doesn’t look sterile as glass and metal are combined with light-coloured wood that gives the inner space a warm and comfortable feeling.
After the tour we’re taken to the plenary hall, the famous semi-circle chamber of the European Parliament where the student delegations were already seated in their working groups. About five hundred students aged 17-18, from 20 EU member states were gathered together. Mr. Philip Otman, the Administrator of Directory General Communication and Information together with four other officials greeted the Euroscola assembly. The delegates were introduced to the voting system of the European Parliament and were invited to ask their questions about the Parliament to the officials who answered them. The questions ranged from what can the European Parliament do about the riots in Greece, and should there be a European President, to what are the advantages of the Lisbon treaty, and how to fight stereotypes and skepticism.
I was proud to see my students in this new light - more mature and conscious, behaving as honorable representatives of Bulgaria.







At lunch time, separated from the students once again we all played the Euroscola game, where in teams of four people from four different nationalities we had to answer 18 questions about the EU, asked in several of the official languages. Not an easy task unless you can read Greek, Hungarian and Finish altogether! In the afternoon Mr. Otman facilitated an official discussion among the teachers about who should come to the Euroscola day, who decides it and how, what should be done to make the young Europeans more active and more informed about the EU and the European Parliament.

After that we were showed the press centre and some more of the working space in the Parliament.
Meanwhile the students discussed in their working groups hot topics like how to encourage the sustainable development of the EU and the active participation of the European citizens in the coming elections for the Parliament on 10th June, what should be done to overcome the effects of the economic crisis, the negative political and social sides of the globalization, the future of Europe and more.
Then the assembly was gathered once again and the working groups of students presented their work and final decisions. After a short debate on each topic the delegates used their votes to support or fight a resolution, and in the end all six resolution passed successfully.
It’s late afternoon when we all say goodbye to the European Parliament, to our new friends from 19 countries and some of us feel they have to come back some day, maybe as representatives of their state to the European Parliament.



We went to the hotel to change into more casual wear and make a tour around the city. The rain had stopped, but as it had lasted for days the river was too high and the boat trip around Strasbourg was canceled, unfortunately. Anyway, we were happy to walk around and we had our dinner in a traditional French restaurant in the Petite France quarter.



Later in the hotel some of us played domino before bedtime.



Day 4 - Saturday 28th March 2009
The breakfast was set for 8.30am and as my colleague Peschu and I considered it late we took the chance to make an early walk before that. We slowly walked the sleepy streets and took some photos. The newspaper shops were opening now and a cheerful stranger with a copy of Dernieres Nouvelles d’Alsace (DNA!) greeted us and wished us ‘Bon weekend’. Now talk about stereotypes!
When we were back for breakfast some people from the group had not yet woken up!  Then the whole group went to see the Notre Dame cathedral and shop for souvenirs. After that the bus took us and away we went on our way to Germany. Next stop - Munich. We got off near the Rathous, the Court’s building, and on Marienplatz our group split. Some went to see the cathedral - Frauenkirche, some went directly shopping. As for Peschu and me, we walked till we found a big toy shop. So carried away we were that by the time we found the guitar shop Peschu was hoping to see so much, it was already closing time. An indifferent man just locked the door from the inside and walked away unable to see the drama unraveling in Peschu’s heart!



Then back on the bus with our shopping trophies we went to the hotel in the outskirts of Munich. There we enjoyed some traditional Bavarian dishes and the cozy beds for the night.



Day 5 - Sunday 29th March 2009
This morning even more people from the group were late for breakfast - the tiredness is taking its toll. We all slept for hours on the bus; the landscapes of Germany here offered nothing to the eye but planes. Occasionally, wind turbines caught the attention of those of us who fancy renewables. More sleep, then talks about Extended Essays. Some of the 11th graders are trying to clarify their ideas and worries about their research questions, the secondary sources etc. Then, the sight of the Danube. We were already in Austria, feasting on its delicious chocolate. A quick look of Vienna’s suburbs as we were headed to another capitol city along the Danube river - Budapest.
There were two problems with our late arrival there - the rain and the forint. And as there’s nothing one can do about the weather, we all agreed our life would have been much easier if Hungary had joined the Euro zone already. We visited the Fishermen’s towers and later walked the wide boulevards under the rain. We found a cozy restaurant to savour on the local cuisine - thick soups served in crispy bread and big plateaus with all kinds of meat.
Back in the hotel, another late domino game for those who could fight the fatigue.
 


Day 6 - Monday 30th March 2009
It was the day of the long way back home. Most of us spent the time sleeping for hours or thinking of something on their own. I felt kind of sad the trip was over, but at the same time couldn’t wait to be back home.

 

Journals of the Forum for Across the Curriculum Teaching 

Colleagues may remember the CLIL journal produced over three years by colleagues in Bulgaria.  The journals were produced voluntarily and were printed with the support of the British Council in Bulgaria.  The covers were designed by our students and the news and materials written by our colleagues.  The journal really documented the development of the network in Bulgaria and then beyond as contacts grew.  
All of the pieces we have available in electronic version are uploaded here to download.



FACT Issue 41


FACT Issue 40


FACT Issue 39


FACT Issue 38


FACT Issue 37


FACT Issue 36


FACT Issue 35


FACT Issue 34


FACT Issue 33


FACT Issue 32


FACT Issue 31


FACT Issue 30


FACT Issue 29


FACT Issue 28


FACT Issue 27


FACT Issue 26


FACT Issue 25


FACT Issue 24


FACT Issue 23


FACT Issue 22


FACT Issue 21


FACT Issue 20


FACT Issue 19

FACT Issue 18

FACT Issue 17

FACT Issue 16

FACT Issue 15

 FACT Issue 14 
                     
FACT Issue 13  

FACT Issue 12

FACT Issue 11

FACT Issue 10

FACT Issue 09

FACT Issue 08

FACT Issue 07

FACT Issue 06

FACT Issue 05

FACT Issue 04

FACT Issue 03

FACT Issue 02

FACT Issue 01

 

Forum for Across the Curriculum Teaching Journal Issue 01

Key terms from the articles and lessons in this journal are:

Year 9 Geography; year 9 Biology; Geog and upper-int general English; year 9 History; letters to the network; CETEFL; Lingua Funding; Science Across the World in Bulgaria; Discussion - needs and standards; Internet sites and links; Lettera Pomagalo Questionnaire

~Forum for Across the Curriculum Teaching Journal Issue 02

Key terms from the articles and lessons in this journal are:

Free 'Total Cloze' software, a story from the American College in Sofia, Science and Language teaching, Concept maps, Jigsaw reading in Science, Cellular metabolism, Parodies, History of Bulgaria, Organisms and the Environment, Oxidation and Reduction, Grade 9 test materials



PDF of FACT Journal Issue 02 is linked at the foot of this page.

 

Forum for Across the Curriculum Teaching Journal Issue 03

Key terms from the articles and lessons in this journal are:

Varn Summer School report; IATEFL BG 9th National Conference; Bi-Ed biology innovations; graphics teaching History in FL; test in National Economy; chemistry dominoes game; questions biology test; To Chicago and Back; Dropen Bricks; intro organic chemistry.

Content:


PDF of FACT Journal Issue 03 is linked at the foot of this page.

Forum for Across the Curriculum Teaching Journal Issue 04 

Key terms from the articles and lessons in this journal are:

anti-Conference report; verse work; UK book project; History - Puritan Revolution (GB, BG); DR(open) Bricks; Dickens nerves; The Reformation; ideas for texts


PDF of FACT Journal Issue 04 is linked at the foot of this page.

Forum for Across the Curriculum Teaching Journal Issue 05

Key terms from the articles and lessons in this journal are:

Walsh's Modern World History; Digestion Rap; Polar Bears; Crossword; World Water Day; Soaps and Detergents; Learning Objectives; Team Work; Student Humour; Chemical Poetry

PDF files of each section of the journal:
Vanya Hristova - B Walsh's 'Modern World History', A time machine to the 20th century
Димитър Марков - Рап за хигиената на храносмилането
Aila Rasim - Polar bears
Desislava Todorova - Predatory plants
Desislava Nikolova - Crossword
Zhivka Nikolova - World Water Day
M. Angelova - Soaps and Detergents
M. Angelova - Learning Objectives
An Instance of Team Work (Collected by Katya Marincheva)
Непомръкващ ученически хумор (събрано от Живка Николова)
Chemical Poetry

Forum for Across the Curriculum Teaching Journal Issue 06

Key terms from the articles and lessons in this journal are:

Language Support Provision; Computer Science in English; Biology Bilingual Education; Being a German Teacher in Bulgaria

Content:

John Clegg - Providing Language Support 

Galina Yovcheva - An Introduction to Teaching Computer Science in English 

K. Shtereva - Conception of Bilingual Education in Biology 

J. Grullich - Als deutcher Lehrer in Bulgarien 
.

Forum for Across the Curriculum Teaching Journal Issue 07

Key terms from the articles and lessons in this journal are:

Quality English; Atomic Structure; Carbon, Oxygen Cycles; Water Cycle; Experiment; Language for Thinking; Le Projet SCALA; PORTFOLIO

Content:

L. Kaneva - Quality Action in English

S. Markova - Structure of the Atom (bg & en)

S .Ivanova - Carbon Cycle and Oxygen Cycle

T. Stefanova - Water Cycle

M. Veselinska, B. Avramova - Experimental Project

J. Clegg - Language for Thinking

D. Veselinov - Le Projet SCALA

J. Beseguet - Le PORTFOLIO a l'usage des l'ecoles

Forum for Across the Curriculum Teaching Journal Issue 08

Key terms from the articles and lessons in this journal are:

Science Across Europe update; CELTA; EFL Teacher Training Methodology; Portfolio Pédagogie; Varna Summer School; Evolution; Biology Creative Writing; Travel Story; Travel Notes; Correspondence; History Museum Biology Lesson; Essays on Europe; 20 C Islas Formadas; Task; Funny Things Students Say 

Content:

 

Forum for Across the Curriculum Teaching Journal Issue 09

Key terms from the articles and lessons in this journal are:

History Foreign Language; Conferences; Gastfreundschaft; Young Physicists Tournament; Teaching Subjects in Foreign Lanugages; Oldenburg; Косе Босе Booklaunch; Correspondence; Tallinn Report; Bulgarische Lehrerinnen; Единството в Европа; Varna Summer School Report; Bratislava Bilingual Forum

Content:

   

Forum for Across the Curriculum Teaching Journal Issue 10 Key terms from the articles and lessons in this journal are:

EAC Project Update; Varna Summer School; Correspondence; Slovenian ESP; Science Biological Weapon; Aquarium Without Fish/Acuario Sin Peces; Cloning Tech; Science Conversation; Kindergarten Collaboration; Health Matters Awards; Proces-verbal Comite Europeen; EAC SIG; Crystal Clean Water  

Content:



 

Forum for Across the Curriculum Teaching Journal Issue 12

Key terms from the articles and lessons in this journal are:
Bulgarian Art History (Анна Йосифова); Animal Idioms; Ortenburg European Education Strategy (БГ); Eine Zehnjahrige Partnershaft; Finland Workshops; Weather English; EU and BG Teachers; History Documents; Romanian School-based Curriculum Project; Students' Work - Psychology of Bulgarians (БГ); Europe Needs My People (БГ); Weihnacht / Neujahr

Content:

Forum for Across the Curriculum Teaching Journal Issue 13

((Note - this will be scanned soon and uploaded here))

 

Forum for Across the Curriculum Teaching Journal Issue 11

Key terms from the articles and lessons in this journal are:

Education in Bulgaria; European History and Communication; European Association of Teachers Committee; Teaching Science through English; Topic-based Language Teaching; CLIL Trainer Training

Content:

M. Koeva - Dear FACT Readers 

D. Zareva - Education in Bulgaria Needs to Focus On... 

K. Paev - Languages and Historical Communication in the European Past 

P. Kernen - AEDE - European Commitee (4 - 5 October, Brussels) 

S. Kitanova - Teaching Science  Through English 

F. Costa - A Topic-based Approach in Language Teaching 

E. Sentevska - Training Trainers for Content and Language Integrated Learning 

This is issue 18 of the FACTWorld Journal, Autumn 2018.

Many thanks to ELICIT-PLUS for part sponsoring this 18th issue of the FACTWorld journal!
Many thanks to Hristiyana Blagoeva for the art used for the cover, and thanks to the children of Anglia School for their lovely artwork!
You can download the entire pdf version of Journal 18 at the foot of this page.

The contents of this journal include:

Big Picture CLIL – Keith Kelly 3
Games in Education – FACT GROUP meeting 7
Ancient Greek Olympics and ancient Greek philosophy - Thomas Ziegelwagner 13
A few reflective comments on the CLIL-lesson about the ancient Greek Olympics and ancient
Greek philosophy - Thomas Ziegelwagner 18
Spanish schools impact stories 20
Удвояване на резултатите с един урок: „Аз съм човекът“ - Вероника Петкова, Искра
Неделчева 24
Digital magazine: a crosscurricular project to increase autonomous learning and creativity –
Arantzazu Martinez Etxarri 28
Българската шевица- геометрия и колорит – Таня Манолова 29
Hands on CLIL – Special course for primary and secondary teachers 34
Etapas de la vida en la biología y la literatura - Stefka Kitánova, Vasil Chakarov 35
ELICIT – European Literacy and Citizenship Education 38

 

Contents:

Soft Skills – a bridge between language CLIL and content CLIL...............................3
Keith Kelly
Two CLIL lessons:
Topic: Fake news! Historic photography real and manipulated.................................13
Thomas Ziegelwagner
Pressemitteilung zur internationalen Lehrertagung 1.-5.10. in Innsbruck.....................20
Sabine Wallinger
Summary
La Scora Ladina - Die ladinische Schule – La scuola ladina – The Ladin school...............22
Heinrich Videsott
Viscosity...................................................................................33
Lyubov Dombeva
Интегриране на дейности в класната стая - път за успешно обучение в XXI век................ 35
Веска Петрова, Рая Данон, Пламен Христов, Мирела Славова
Oscar Wilde and the paradoxes of ecological education.......................................39
Stefka Kitanova, Vasil Chakarov

A Bulgarian once said to me that good things take time, and the best could take forever. Well, Issue 20 of the FACTWorld Journal has been a long time coming, so it must be really good!

The theme is waste and sustainability and celebrates the 20th anniversary of the FACTWorld network with proceedings from the Pre-Conference day at the Bulgarian English Teachers Assocation conference.

Here's to 20 more years of CLIL collaboration, support and networking.
Enjoy!
Keith

Contents:

Introduction - FACTWorld at 20 by Keith Kelly

From SAW to TrashedWorld by Lida Schoen

Natural Materials in my Classroom by Lora Atanasova

Microbeads around us by Egbert Weisheit

Adopt the Adata – interactive environmental education on Maritsa river and Adata River Island by Stanimir Navushtanov, Ventzislav Vassilev and Keith Kelly

Picker Pals “We have Picker Power!” by Patrick Jackson

TrashedWorld – New Draft Module by Keith Kelly

Future in the past – years went by – by Stefka Kitanova, Vasil Chakarov, Maria Dobcheva
 
Download pdf of Journal 20
 

Who would have thought what would come when we were celebrating our 20th anniversary just a few months ago!

Our 21st journal has a wonderful 'coming of age' ring to it despite the quarantine lockdown circumstances!
We have items from all over the place, in many languages.
Soft CLIL CPD from Georgia,
History lesson ‘Deconstructing/Debunking a historical personality’ from Austria.
A lesson on Bulgarian kings as well as a lesson on paper plane construction and testing from Bulgaria.
History continues from Italy with an examination of the mediaeval Italian book ‘The City of the Sun’.
We have a chemistry and different ‘Laws of Physics’, both from Bulgaria.
We have an Erasmus+ project report from Bulgarian, English, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian and Polish contributors on ‘Urban Science’.
We have a second Erasmus+ project report taking us into ‘Art and Inclusion’ from the Spanish Grammar School, Sofia in Bulgaria.
We have some fabulous artwork from our amazing students (many thanks!)

Stay safe and healthy, and keep sending us your contributions, and we’ll keep publishing them in FACT!

Download pdf of Journal 21

Bulgaria FACT Journals Issue 22

We hope you are all keeping well and sane! We’re happy to be able to put out a new FACTWorld Journal,
and it’s a rich and varied collection as usual!
I was asked by a colleague to work up a sequence of lesson activities based on Chinese mother tongue science on the topic of ‘The Water Cycle’ and you can find the complete discussion of this process. We have an original poem / song from Frank O’Reilly called the ‘Maid of Durban Town’ accompanied by a series of lesson activities. Our art theme is taken from the cover (Da Vinci rocks!) with two versions of ‘Draw me a story’ integrating art and storytelling. A story is integrated with Maths in the next item – Gold Hunters’ Tournament. Next, we have a Bulgarian language prose from a school leaver musing on the year gone by: ‘Covid perspective of 2020’. Literature continues along with music art integration taking us into the next item which uses a Dylan original as a template for biology, chemistry work in English. We also have a report on an Erasmus+ schools Art inclusion project and an announcement of a multilingual Erasmus+ project around ‘discovering identity’. All in all, a bumper package! Enjoy!

Download pdf of Journal 22

FACTWorld issue 23 is the result of the week of Aug 30th to Sept 3rd 2021 when a group of 14 Italian primary teachers came to Anglia School in Plovdiv, Bulgaria for a week’s training in ‘Putting CLIL into Practice’.
The week included 5 CLIL themes spread over the 5 days. Monday looked at levels of language: subject specific, general academic, and peripheral classroom language. Tuesday focused on working with texts. Wednesday looked at working with multi-media. Thursday concentrated on writing and Friday – speaking. On each day, the participants were presented with a principled CLIL approach to each of the above areas as well as a wide range of examples from classroom practice at Anglia School.
The afternoons of each day were dedicated to materials writing where the colleagues wrote resources based on the morning input and which would be immediately usable once back in school in the Autumn term.
You will notice that some of the collections are presented in a logical sequenced form representing how they can proceed in a lesson, others are offered as ‘examples of reading activities’ for a given curriculum theme. Both approaches were accepted in this collection.
The broad CLIL ‘Principles’ which the colleagues ‘Put into Practice’ during the week together were:
- There are three levels of language that a teacher may decide to focus on in a lesson. This includes subject-
specific language or language you can’t do without; there is also general academic language which
tends to be less visible and so will need to be made accessible for learning to make use of it themselves;
and there is peripheral language which is the language of the classroom instruction, and the ‘chat’ between
those involved.
- Teachers working on content in a foreign language will need to think about ‘Guiding learners through
Input’ whether this is text input or other forms of media such as slides, posters, videos etc. We focused a
lot of identifying ‘inherent’ conceptual structures to content in order to exploit that structure in materials
and tasks and best help learners process input content.
- Teachers will also want to think about ‘Supporting Output’ where this refers to written production or
spoken production. Here, again, conceptual structures were centre stage to explore with colleagues how
a structure, for example like a river from beginning to end can be exploited to get learners communicating
using embedded language.
What follows is a collection of examples from the course input followed by the resources written by the
teachers. The aim of the collection is to provide other colleagues with a rich collection of primary CLIL
ideas for developing language and learning skills in content.
It was a thoroughly enjoyable experience for me personally, and a pleasure to show a group of visitors
my adopted country and beautiful home town. I look forward to doing it again!
Keith (10.09.21)
keith@anglia-school.info


Download FACTworld Journal Issue 23

In collaboration with AEDE (The European Association of Teachers, Bulgaria section), and working with teachers from the CLIL Coordination Centre, Cyprus (https://clil.schools.ac.cy/index.php/en/), I had the delightful privilege of working with colleagues from Pre-Primary schools in Cyprus who came 
to Anglia School for a week of training and cultural experiences through the Erasmus+ programme in early December, 2021. 

Our focus during the course was Implementing a Pre-Primary CLIL Curriculum – A Whole-School Approach, and FACT Journal 24 is the product of this week spent together. 

The sections of the journal broadly represent the structure of the days of the training:
The Pre-Primary Curriculum in Cyprus - Science.
This introduction looks at one section of the Greek-medium pre-primary curriculum in Cyprus and takes initial steps in 'rewriting' this science section to accommodate a CLIL approach through English.
Section 1 – Building a Pre-Primary CLIL Curriculum – Up and Down Dynamics
This section takes a whole-picture look at the pre-primary curriculum and offers a flow of energy throughout the activities in tune with the energy levels of very young children.
Section 2 – Concepts and Skills – an overview
Here, we explore appropriate concepts for children in pre-primary and consider language opportunities through sample tasks.
Section 3 - Creating, visualizing and interacting with concepts
This section outlines a wide range of multi-media input for pre-rimary CLIL with more examples from the Anglia School classes.
Section 4 – Talk through Skills
Finally, we work on a rich collection of speaking activities exploiting some of the same conceptual structures and more from previous sessions.

The journal is jam packed full of pre-primary CLIL principles and practice and we hope you find it useful for your journey in Pre-Primary CLIL!
Keith (10.02.22)
keith@anglia-school.info

Download FACT Journal Issue 24

Here we are with FACT 25, cram packed with wonderful multilingual education!
We offer an outline of the course Putting CLIL into Practice which is hosted at Anglia School in Bulgaria, 
and for which teachers in EU can apply for Erasmus+ funding. The course offers a grounding in CLIL materials and pedagogy.
If you’re a fan of graphing, there are some creative mathematical drawings following the Cartesian coordinate system. The piece is in the Bulgarian language, and is for 6th Grade.
Next, we have an integrated language and science lesson with a focus on male hygiene advertisements 
and with the combined aims of developing life skills and interpreting misleading data.
LyubovDombeva also offers a set of student science project 3D boxes in English.
The following piece is trilingual English-Spanish-Bulgarian and focuses on the introduction of the names 
of the chemical elements by using element formula as a way of spelling the elements themselves. This is 
followed by two pieces of student homework from Biology on the cardio-vascular system, Grade 9, Spanish. We are pleased also to include the work of winners of the 2021 Spanish literature competition.
Next, we have a lesson on capital cities based on the text from a song with accompanying worksheet and 
map.
Research is presented on the Education Policy Network’s on progress in making teacher and school 
leader careers more attractive in Europe.
Finally, this bumper issue concludes with a bilingual piece describing celebrations of Bulgarian traditions 
in schools.
The collection is illustrated here and there with artwork gratefully received from students and children in 
our network!
Thank you everyone!

Download FACT Journal 25

The UN SDGs as a focus for Primary CLIL

This collection of Primary CLIL resources is the product of a week of Erasmus+ CLIL training at Anglia School in Bulgaria.

We had the idea of focusing specifically on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals while developing resources for primary CLIL.

The 14 participants from Italy and Romania received input on the following primary CLIL principles:
- Language: subject specific terms + general academic language
- Guiding through input text
- Guiding through non-text input media
- Supporting output writing
- Supporting output speaking.

Participants were also presented with a vast range of examples of practice from Anglia School classes.

On this backdrop of principles and practice, our guests were invited to produce themed materials based on the principles, examples and with a view to developing one or more of the UNSDGs.

The UNSDGs linked to the titles of the Primary CLIL projects are:
Biodiversity: Elisabetta, Gianluigi, Annamaria (SDG14and 15)
Gender Equality: Fabrizio, Federico and Viola (SDG5)
Good Health: Ilaria, Erica and Marta (SDG2)
Life on Land: Marinella, Lucia and Raffaella (SDG15)
Responsible Consumption: Ioana and Bianca (SDG12)

I collated, proofread and edited all the materials, so while the colleagues did all the hard work, any error or lack of clarity anywhere is mine!

I think what the colleagues managed in the space of 5 days is remarkable.

Enjoy and share please!

Download FACT Journal 26

Intercultural Communicative Competence for Very Young Learners CLIL

This collection of resources was compiled during the Erasmus+ Course – Putting Preprimary CLIL into 
Practice which took place at Anglia School Bulgaria from July 4th to 8th, 2022.

A wonderful group of 10 Italian and 3 Romanian preprimary teachers came to us to work on CLIL.
We decided to create a focus for CLIL with Intercultural Communicative Competences for very young learners.

So, in short, we covered young learner CLIL pedagogy AND produced a range of resources and activities for developing intercultural skills in 
young learner classes.

It’s incredible how productive the colleagues managed to be in the few days we had together. What you see here is the result of their work. Bravo!

Congratulations, and thank you to you all for your hard work!

Enjoy and share please.
Keith

PS - I edited, proofed and collated all the materials, so any errors are entirely mine. 

Download FACT Journal 27

This collection of primary resources is the combined work of two groups of Erasmus+ teachers who came to our course ‘Putting CLIL Into Practice’ in October and November 2022 (French and Italian group 17.10.22 - 21.10.22 and Italian and Spanish group 31.10.22 - 04.11.22).

Both groups had a similar teaching profile and they came in close succession, so it made sense to collate their work into this jam-packed publication!
The focus was a free choice for these groups with an invitation to develop resources immediately usable back home in their teaching contexts.

As the rugby world cup was under way while we worked with the first group, it is no surprise that gender equality was chosen as a focus for one group’s resources. A second group wanted to develop Maths CLIL materials and chose number bonds to 10. Lastly, there is a schema for developing a science topic with an accent on recycling. Our second group of teachers included teachers at the upper end of nursery and lower end of primary, and they chose the topic of relationships to develop resources. The other two mini groups of colleagues both chose Science, the digestive system and vertebrates for their materials work.

But it wasn’t all about teaching methodology and materials! As you know Erasmus+ is about cultural experiences, the language, it’s about the flavours, the sounds, the sights and engaging with all that is Bulgarian. I hope we managed to provide these experiences for these dear colleagues through our dancing and music (thank you to Martin at the Plovdiv cultural centre!), through our cooking (yes, we made banitsa!) and the special Bulgarian tastes that the colleagues experienced every day and through the visits to the unique historical and cultural sights that the city of Plovdiv offers. Needless to say, we worked hard, AND our visitors fell in love with Bulgaria! We hope they come back to visit us again soon! Enjoy and share please,
Keith
Plovdiv, 27.11.22

PS – as usual, I did all the editing and proofing (with Stefka’s trusty help) and so while all the credit should go to our colleagues for their work, any mistakes you find are entirely mine.

Download FACT Journal 28

This wonderful collection of preprimary materials focuses on two themes: Autumn Forests and Animals and Culture. The themes were part of the lesson observation carried out by two groups of visitors to Anglia School in November and December 2022. What you see here are the session notes and materials
from the lessons observed along with the brainstorm of additional activities and materials by the groups of visitors.
Again, Erasmus+ provided the means for us all to get together to share ideas and experiences. In the first instance this was teaching ideas, but let’s not forget that the colleagues also got the amazing opportunity to visit Plovdiv and Bulgaria. In doing this, we gave the teachers all manner of sense experiences with the sounds, sights, smells, flavours and touch of Bulgarian life, culture and language.
There is also a lovely two-page spread from our partner school Colegio Maria Madre Rosa Molas, Zaragoza.

Their invitation for school links is there for all to see. Get in touch!

The structure of the content in this publication follows the structure of the week-long visits of our colleagues from Spain. Additionally, you will find brainstorm sections where we explore the themes further following pedagogical principles.

The first theme is Forest Animals and the second theme is Cultural Awareness and for both of these themes you will find the session notes from the lessons visited by our colleagues.

It was a full, satisfying couple of weeks which sped by as fast as they always do, but we hope that this collection which has been printed to give personal copies to our visitors, will also provide other teachers with lots of ideas by sharing the pdf which you can find on www.factworld.info.

Many thanks to all involved, to the teachers for their input, to Diana for hosting our visitors and to Stefka for making sure it all fits together well and tidily. As usual, I put everything together, checked and proofread everything, so any errors you find are entirely down to me.
Please share!
Keith (02.03.23)

Download FACT Journal 29

It’s always a pleasure to introduce a jubilee edition of our FACT Journal. We’ve reached 30, wow! I remember the days when we were photocopying the contributions and stapling them together. You can still access every single issue at https://www.factworld.info/en/Bulgaria-FACT-Journals too!
This issue is another bumper collection of wonderful materials on a vast range of themes and in multiple languages.
We have two high-level history lessons contributed from Austria around the theme of monastic life and its role in the middle ages. An Esperanto speaker gives an insightful summary of some of the characteristics and advantages of this language. There’s a summary of an important Erasmus+ project on ‘Cultural heritage and values education in European schools’. An innovative Spanish contribution describes a project offering an approach to culture and literature through interactive games. If you’re interested in English idiom around food, you’ll find that here! There’s also a lesson looking at the poem The Night Before Christmas and the origin of the names of the reindeer. A valuable Bulgarian contribution describes work on empathy and friendship in upper preschool classes. There’s also a fabulous Spanish essay entitled ‘The Rebirth of Art’. An interesting article follows in the Bulgarian language entitled ‘Between Order and Revolution’ with observations on the function of art in the interwar years of the 20th Century. A Bulgarian-language review of cinema in school and beyond gives a delightful description of 5 films projected to school children at the French Institute in Sofia. There is a Spanish-medium lesson focused on the song ‘Gracias a la vida’ with lyrics and activities. We also have a presentation of EEPN, the European Education Policy Network on Teachers and School Leaders (EEPN), its aims and work.
I think whole-hearted thanks must go out to all contributors to this special birthday edition – Thank You!
Thank you for helping us celebrate education in a multilingual Europe and wider world.
Keith
25.02.23

Download FACT Journal 30

With forewords from both John Clegg and Phil Ball, and an introduction from Eva Tatarova, this special edition of the FACTWorld Journal is dedicated to dear colleagues in Ukraine and abroad who participated in an online course - Putting CLIL into Practice.
Eva first got in touch about the course and our work at Anglia School with words of interest and encouragement, hinting that she would be happy to visit one day, and be glad also to be able to attend the course. From there we spoke about offering the course online as I had previoulsy done so with colleagues in Spain during the pandemic, and so we all met for the first meeting and the course began.
This collection does two things. Firstly, the publication summarises the contents of the course so that colleagues in Ukraine with an interest in CLIL can read it and consider if CLIL can be of use for their work. Secondly, it is a collection of some of the work of the participants on the course.
The course follows 10 modules on CLIL methods and materials writing, largely reflecting the content of our face-to-face course for Erasmus+ teachers visiting Bulgaria. The difference is that the online course starts each module with a YouTube film on a theme. This ends with a task which participants work on during the following week, and then send to me for feedback. The third aspect of the structure is our Zoom meeting where I share the feedback with the group. 
The quality of the work reflects the extent to which the participants embraced the CLIL approach. This collection is testimony to the hard work of our Ukrainian colleagues.
In addition to the course content and some of the participant assignment works, we also have a contribution from Natalya Zachynska who went through the online CLIL course alone and subsequently embraced CLIL to take on the task of producing a course of her own which would develop the English language of front line responders and military in the context of emergency and crisis response content materials (TCCC - Tactical Combat Casualty Care). 
As always, the editing work is all mine with help from dear friend and colleague Stefka Kitanova for the preprint version you see here. So, any errors you find are mine!
Please read and share!
Keith
22.08.23
Download FACT Journal 31
 

I had the pleasure and privilege of working with three groups of colleagues from a small cluster of schools from Settimo in Italy this summer. I say it was a pleasure and a privilege because despite the heat of Plovdiv, they were very energetic and able to invest of themselves in my course Putting CLIL into 
Practice with a thirst for ideas. It was this drive to embrace CLIL which has led to the collection in this publication of the FACT Journal.
It’s also a joy to dedicate an entire publication to the work of a tight-knit group of teachers from the same schools for the simple reason that you know the materials will be used and will be useful.
In fact, the coordinator for the teachers Erasmus+ mobilities, Alessandra, has had the foresight to discuss with me how we might build on this collection of resources, this product of their participation in Putting CLIL into Practice. I suggested immediately that the colleagues who had participated on the course might contribute to dissemination activities themselves, and to which I would be delighted to contribute also. So, we are now planning these events in Piemonte for the coming school year. What will you find in the journal? 
The teachers came from preprimary, primary and middle school and so the resources reflect this age range. There subject interests were similarly varied, including Religious Studies, Mathematics, Science (Biology), Geography, History, Art and English. There was also Italian, but we didn’t go on to produce 
any Italian-medium resources. Within the subject areas, after some work on CLIL principles and visiting activities in Anglia School summer programme, we managed to focus smoothly on areas which would be of use for the teaching in the new term for the colleagues.
There are resources which focus with the first group on Science and the senses, and specifically the sense of sight for the primary CLIL classroom. Related to this, but with a dual preprimary and primary goal, there are activities for Geometry and shapes. You will also find a lesson with a marvelous focus on supporting Primary learners in writing a biography for a religious figure in history, taking Moses as the example. The second group of colleagues came with some significant experience of CLIL and we took their needs and ideas very early on to lead the sessions on Principles of CLIL and this led to resources for Civics and safety online, Biology and organs in the human body, History-Geography and Egypt and the Nile, which initially came from a desire to develop resources for teaching about how humans interact with bodies of water on our planet. Last but not least, group 3 came with a wide ranging background in teaching which we manage to bring together in a super project for Science-Geography-English and plastic pollution in our biosphere.
Aside from the CLIL, our visitors managed to see all manner of beautiful sights in Bulgaria, taste the range of magnificent flavours Bulgaria has to offer, take in the smells (think roses), the sounds (think Bulgarian folk) and touch life in this glorious little country I’m proud to call my adopted home. 
All in all, it was a tiring but extremely satisfying three weeks, an experience I would readily do again if the opportunity arises!
Keith
24.10.2023
PS – as usual while these colleagues put in hard work over three weeks in my courses, the drafting and editing were down to me, and so if you should spot any errors, they are entirely my responsibility!

Download FACT Journal 32
 

Global Warming and its Impact on Living Things on Earth
(an integrated approach)
 
Introduction
The collection of resources found in this publication of the FACT Journal was compiled during two weeks of work at the Bell Foundation, Cambridge in the summer of 2023. The Teaching CLIL course brought together 6 teachers from Spain, Macau and Italy with a diverse subject background including chemistry, biology, technology, geography, history and a generalist with a whole-curriculum perspective as well as one English teacher who joined the group later.
I imagined it would be a challenge to identify a focus for such a diverse group, but the title to this publication came about relatively easily and the colleagues quickly set about applying the ideas from our input sessions to producing materials for their particular subject area under this umbrella heading.
As it was, the integrated approach that we adopted gave the colleagues the freedom to work in their own directions, but always ‘joined up’ with the project as a whole.
So, in this publication you will find a range of thematic resources for secondary CLIL. There is a section called ‘Understanding the Science’ in which we present a biology perspective focusing on the types of fuels (renewable and non-renewable), and their advantages and disadvantages. Additionally, you will find a chemistry perspective which focuses on the reactions resulting from our uses of fossil fuels and the consequences they have for our planet. There is a section called ‘Understanding the Data’ aimed at the technology curriculum where students deal with both data about energy use generally, but more specifically energy use in the home and the devices we use. There is a section called ‘The Historical Perspective’ which presents a focus on the industrial revolutions, inventions, as well as processes involved in use of the inventions and the changes they brought about for life on Earth. There is a section called ‘How it Affects my Life’ (context Macau) which takes the region as a context for a more personal look at the way global warming affects the lives of the children who live there. Lastly, we have a ‘Language Perspective’ which offers investigations into the lifestyles and behaviours of students in Napoli as well as work on making changes in our lives to reduce our carbon footprint.
Last, but by no means least, we decided to include the ‘Climate Change’ draft project which was produced by dear colleagues at Science Across the World moons ago. Please feel free to make use of that structure to guide your projects in this area.
All in all, a bumper edition, with scope for much more! Please share and use!

Keith
30.11.23
PS - as usual, the hard work is thanks to these colleagues who have put in their time and their brains to produce these materials. I proofread and make the materials fit into the Journal, with many thanks to Stefka for her help. Any errors you find are mine!

Download FACT Journal 33

A Winter CLIL Collection 

FACT Journal 34 comes to you from the cold mid-winter of 2023-2024 with the prospect of a warm spring on the way. You’ll find many things to warm your heart! We begin with some useful ideas on puppet theatre for our younger learners along with rich resources for developing language through the seasons, riddles, rhymes and stories from Mariana Dyankova and Leda Mileva.
We have Spanish writings on ‘Las leyes de la Naturaleza y mi destino’ from Gabriele Di Stefano and students aged 14 to 16.
Rainbows are widely and colourfully explored in Spanish, French and Bulgarian, presented by Dayana Borisova and Ekaterina Kyoseva followed by activities from Stefka Kitanova and Vasil Chakarov.
Mia Gigova and Marta Horozova argue effectively for ‘Más folclore por Europa’ and Konstantin Nikandrov offers a eventful perspective on a museum trip.
Stoyan Faldjiyski lays out the crucial importance of NBS (nature-based solutions) in school education and presents the Erasmus+ Teacher Academies project which has as its aim to develop this area of learning in Europe.
Last but not least we have an important lesson from Olga Zhdan on citizenship focusing on developing awareness and sensitivity in communication in society where prosthetics are concerned.

Please use and share this wonderful collection with colleagues!

Best wishes
Keith
PS - I proofread and edit all the materials, and so any typos are entirely my responsibility!

Download FACT Journal 34

CLIL for EAL at The International School of Belgrade 

It's a great privilege to visit another teacher's class, particularly when you are there to provide feedback and ideas. I'd firstly like to thank all of the colleagues who warmly welcomed me into their lessons at ISB. I learned a lot from you!
I was invited with my CLIL hat on to visit the school to provide ideas for teachers who are of late receiving more students with greater language needs in their classes. I saw a broad range of lessons from a lesson on the Model United Nations, another class on Voice in Drama, two maths lessons 'Expressing Solutions to Maths Problems' and 'Rules for Radicals', a design lesson where students write up their research plan for a project, and last but not least a literature lesson focusing on dystopian works. I take my hat off to these teachers and recognize too the quality of the students in their lessons. In each class I was placed with students who have the greatest needs for language support. I met young people who could speak very little English who managed to function thanks to translation applications. I met young people with minimal Englsh, but high subject knowledge finding their way through expressing themselves in English as a foreign language.
This collection of resources both summarises the lessons visited and offers ideas for providing learners with language support within lessons. 
If there is a conclusion to draw from the experience, it is this. The teachers and learners have developed strategies for coping in class in an admirable way. What they could usefully use is a resource like a 'language handbook' where both teachers and student can go for academic language presented in response to curriculum objectives. 
This collection offers a start to this process.

Please use and share this collection with your EAL and CLIL colleagues!

Best wishes
Keith
PS - I proofread and edit all the materials, and so any typos are entirely my responsibility!

Download FACT Journal 35

It's not an easy activity to work online with young learners. I take my hat off to any colleagues who routinely do this kind of work!
CLIL, on the other hand, does offer a dimension which can be very motivating even in an online context.
When you use the technology and the opportunities the online environment provides for exploring and communicating, the results can be more than expected.
I first met Alex when her mother got in touch with my school Anglia School to ask about online classes. We had prepared some online lessons in the past, the pandemic made this compulsory. But, Anglia School has always been about learning by doing, practical hands-on activities with immediate communication both with teacher and in the group. So, I admit to being a little anxious at first about working online with Alex. 
Alex's mother had mentioned that she would like Alex to maintain the English she had grown up with being born in the UK. Alex is a fluent speaker of English for this obvious reason.
But at the age of 7, she was also a young learner at a transition period in her education moving from Preschool to Primary. This brings with it the challenge of reading and writing in the language of the classroom. In Alex's case, she did have English lessons here in Bulgaria but they were aimed, understandably, at the level of her Bulgarian classmates. 
The interest for me came with the clear need Alex would have in maintaining not simply her conversational English, but maintaining and developing the language of learning that she had begun to develop in a UK Preschool programme. It was this language of learning, along with the request for writing that led to the creation of this publication.
The initial idea was stories about friends exploring and travelling together, but as Alex's ideas and interests took shape and I provided content and opportunity for her to read about and explore the Geography, History and Environmental Issues that became a natural part of the texts that Alex was to write, we soon understood that we have a collection of Environmental Adventures on our hands.
The texts are almost entirely Alex's creations. I guided and prompted, provided background material on the areas we visited with the five friends and also turned Alex's sketches into images we could use in the story texts themselves. Alex also enjoys wordsearches, so we did some of those too. There was much more than the writing during our meetings, but these writings became a constant 'input' and fed into the ongoing 'output' of our classes.
Alex has said that she would like the book to be interesting and useful to other learners of English. 
My take on this whole process is this - I wish all children the chance to write and publish their ideas and for them to see these creations in print.
It is highly motivating and totally worth all the work!
Please share! 
Keith (and Alex), June, 2024 

PS - I collated, edited and proofread all of the text and as such any errors and issues are my mistakes!

Download FACT Journal 36
 

Welcome to another bumper issue of FACT.
Contributions from a wide range of subject areas this issue include a Bulgarian-language piece - Материи и мистерии на любовта (Materials and the Mysteries of Love) - a lesson combining the love poetry of Robert Burns with sex education.
There is a second Bulgarian piece - Енергийни напитки ли? - with a survey with a focus on energy drinks and their effect on the human body presenting results of questions answered by the students of a school.
Next we have a Spanish language report on an Erasmus+ project involving schools in Italy, Bulgarian, Spain and Poland and which was dedicated to the Periodic Table in Museums.
A second project report in Spanish describes ‘Genio & Ingenio’ or Genius and Ingenuity and obstacles of the pandemic notwithstanding a successful Erasmus+ experience.
An Etwinning project based on a ‘fable’ format is summarised in Bulgarian involving Bulgaria, Spain and Portugal.
A personal Bulgarian language perspective on project participation is given entitled До Париж и обратно – с фолклор и дъжд (To Paris and back with folklore and rain).
This is followed by a Bulgarian language project description dealing with the theme of European Culture – Is there one?
Related to this piece is the dissemination description outlining 10 lesson plans made available through AEDE-NL on the European Cultural Project.
Two teachers from Zamora, Spain then describe a ‘job shadowing’ carried out with the ‘Miguel de Cervantes’ Spanish Language School in Sofia, Bulgaria.
Lastly, we have two French medium articles from two preschool teachers who visited Anglia School, Plovdiv for Erasmus+ CLIL training.
As usual, we rely on your help sharing this publication and spreading the word on multilingual education and CLIL.

Keith
October 2024

PS - I collated, edited and proofread all of the text and as such any errors and issues are my mistakes!

Download FACT Journal 37

Bulgaria - FACT Journals Issue 39

We’ve adopted the title of Kaleidoscope CLIL for our upcoming FACT Journal 25th anniversary jubilee meeting in Plovdiv, and this issue certainly is a rich array of contributions!
You will find a fascinating discussion on preparing teachers for skills in the era of AI with ‘Empowering Teachers and Learners with Meta-Scientific Literacies’ from Maria Steger, excellent reading if you’re interested in teaching critical thinking in the AI world. 
There is an engaging Bulgarian-medium story on bread from seed to loaf! 
You’ll find some excellent student creative work in the poem ‘The stars also tire’ by Nadezhda Zlatareva, 12th grade student at the Language School – Plovdiv.
Yet more contributions from our motivated students can be seen in an English-medium report on ‘Yale Young Global Scholars’ with the subtitle ‘the summer program of a lifetime’.
This is from Bozhidara Doneva, from the 164 Spanish Language School – Sofia. It certainly sounds like the opportunity of a lifetime!
Звездна биология (The Biology of Stars) is a fascinating Bulgarian-medium presentation of the naming with biological terms of stars and galaxies from Stefka and Vasil - Стефка Китанова, FACTWorld Bulgaria and Васил Чакъров, Институт за гората – София, БАН. 
We read a creative presentation of the making of bread, now here is an academic Bulgarian-language exposition of the process which combines social and historical themes entitled - От зърното до трапезата: едно STEM пътешествие в света на хляба, by students Elka and Ani from the 21 School Hristo Botev in Sofia, and Ани Петрова from 21. СУ „Христо Ботев“ – София.
Last, but by no means least, we have a fascinating presentation on the process of differentiating between natural and synthetic fabrics from a team of colleagues from the ‘Profesionalna Gimnaziya PO Tekstil I Obleklo Dobri Jelyazkov’ in the city of Sliven. (Изследователски център „Ужас и хаус“, Юлияна Калошева, ст. учител по БЗО, ХООС, инж. Петър Петров, учител по професионална подготовка, инж. Таньо Христов, учител по професионална подготовка, ПГТО „Добри Желязков“- Сливен).
Last, but by no means least, you will find a Bulgarian-medium piece on using materials destined for the dump for creating and using beautiful musical instruments by Gergana Budinova (Гергана Будинова) a primary teacher from 21 Hristo Botev School (21 СУ „Христо Ботев“ София)
An amazing collection, and a worthy addition to our celebratory 25th year of publications of the FACTWorld Journal, thank you to all contributors!
Please share!
Keith
March 2025

Download FACT Journal 39

Bulgaria - FACT Journals Issue 40

Continuing our celebration of the FACT Journal 25th anniversary jubilee, we have a journal dedicated to CLIL for Very Young Learners.
It has taken several months to get this issue together because it involves two visiting groups to Anglia School's course Putting CLIL into Practice one from France and the other from Italy, as well as a contribution from a colleague in Spain.
The first section offers an early years collection of lessons which was produced by two teachers from France from preprimary and primary visiting our course in April 2024. These dear friends decided to focus on materials for developing the UNSDGs in their young learner classes. Their material has been produced to link directly with two UNSDGs: 2 – Zero Hunger and 12 – Responsible Consumption. You’ll see that as we worked together during the week’s training, the materials we created revolved around picturebooks.
Later in the year we had a visit from a group of 7 Italian preschool teachers for our course and their chosen focus was Intercultural Communicative Competence for very young learners. These colleagues visited our preschool classes for a week of ‘culture’ and the session notes are also included in this collection.
The next section, then, presents the lessons our Italian friends participated in. Imagine that, an entire week of culture classes for young learners. There are lots of ideas for you if you’d like to develop culture in your early years curriculum.
As part of their week with us, the Italians also produced lessons with a culture focus. They chose to develop materials on the themes of ‘Lunch’ and ‘Autumn’. These are included in both Italian and English.
Last, but by no means least, we have a welcome contribution from a colleague in Spain with tips for aligning English language teaching and learning with L1 Pre-Primary projects.
I hope you enjoy this collection! Please share and help us celebrate our 25th birthday!
Happy birthday to us!

Download FACT Journal 40

CLIL School, Uzhgorod, Ukraine 24-28th March, 2025

I had been to Ukraine once before, to Lviv, to contribute to a short meeting of teachers with an interest in CLIL and it was during this meeting that the dynamic coordinator Natalia Liashko asked about the possibility of a one-week course along the lines of the Putting CLIL into Practice courses I run in Anglia School in Bulgaria. I said, ‘let’s do it!’ and Natalia, being the meticulous organizer she is, set about polling interest in her network of colleagues around Ukraine.
20 teachers came together for the course from around Ukraine, including Poltava and Hirkiv. This CLIL school was to be in the city of Uzhgorod, close to the Hungarian/Slovak border and we were hosted very well by Lycee no. 3. The school being on a week’s holiday meant we were given access to a couple of classrooms, and the school canteen worked just for us to provide delicious lunches. Not only did they feed us splendidly (thank you!) but they allowed us to use the kitchen facilities so that I could make a Bulgarian banitsa with the teachers.
As always, these training events are a mixture of things. We learn together, we ‘edutain’ together and we socialize together. In this collection you will find a range of materials reflecting the varied interests of the colleagues who worked specifically to produce resources with their own groups in mind.
We have a fabulous project on ‘cheese’ where students get to make their own. There is a look into music over time, and as with the cheese, students are invited to express their opinions on what they hear. There is a project on ‘presence online’ where students create a video to post. Last, but by no means least there is a project focusing on Transcarpathia, our host region for the course in Uzhgorod.
As always any errors you spot are all mine, but all the hard work is thanks to the dynamic colleagues from Ukraine. Thank you!
Keith    04.07.25

Download FACT Journal 41
 

FACT Meetings return!

The European Association of Teachers (AEDE) and Anglia School are collaborating to provide ongoing professional development meetings for teachers.

The first meeting will focus on good examples of CLIL (content and language integrated learning), showing a range of resources, activities and projects which will be of interest to both language teachers and content subject teachers alike.

The first meeting will take place in Plovdiv on Nov 11th at Anglia School's Kapitan Raicho Street premises.

Tell your teacher friends and colleagues, this important meeting will work towards building a community of teachers sharing and developing ideas together.

We look forward to seeing you there!

The FACT group is ten years old this year!

 
05th Oct, 2009

We kept it a little bit quiet, mainly because although we would have loved to celebrate and have a big party where everyone of the three thousand plus colleagues in the network all come to Bulgaria to help put this event down in history, though we'd love to do have done that, we just didn't have the resources!

So, what we did is have a small event with a lot of heart and energy. In collaboration with Macmillan in Bulgaria we ran a celebratory workshop to mark the event of the 10th Anniversary of the FACT Group.

 
As you can see it took place at the Veren Bookshop from 2 to 5 on Oct 2nd. There were a number of presentations from colleagues, Lyubov Dombeva, Stefka Kitanova and myself, and there was a birthday cake too!

Colleagues came from a wide range of educational contexts to celebrate and do a bit of work. The group represented both the state and private sectors, primary, secondary and university courses and from a number of locations around Bulgaria! The agenda for the meeting was to take stock of what we've achieved, discuss the future, and to take a look at the IB programme in Bulgaria and projects between Bulgaria and abroad.

Teachers' house, Plovdiv, home to several FACT events

Anglo-American College, Sofia

The FACT Group started with a group of 30 teachers in 1999 during a teacher training course in Sofia. There were many events along the way, with many milestones.

There were 5 Summer Schools held in Varna with a varied international participation from Romania to China!

Special thanks to Macmillan for their support for this event. We probably couldn't have done it without them. Thanks also for the numerous gifts we were able to offer teachers in a lottery during the event including the Science VPS, the Geography VPS, Uncovering CLIL, the Macmillan Schools' Dictionary and others. Thanks very much!

Dan the man from Macmillan setting up

The work we did was based around what we've already achieved. I presented on the history of the group with the view to identifying what worked and why. We took this list as a focus for discussing what we could do in the future.

Browsing resources during coffee and cake.

There is a lot to say about the factworld group, it's past, present and future. You can download the PPT here if interested and would like to take a look. It's 18mb.

My presentation on FACTWorld

The feedback from discussion on the future of the group was interesting, and actually means that we'll be organizing more meetings as we used to do during the initial phase of the project. More about the outcomes of the meeting below.

Colleagues took things home with them apart from a tummy full of birthday cake!

Even I got a present. When I saw it I thought it would be something which explodes, but thankfully it was a lovely aromatic candle. Thanks colleagues, the candle has brought a new freshness to my office!

Gifts all round.

Colleagues discussing future initiatives

Stefka on projects in Bulgaria and beyond

William Shakespeare Language School, Sofia

The FACT Group met every six weeks or so over the course of 4 years in the beginning. This led to a number of successful initiatives, not least bringing Science Across the World to Bulgaria.

The Science Across the Balkans event in Plovdiv was to forge links with 13 countries around South Eastern Europe (and including the Baltics!).

SAB Group, Plovdiv

Varna summer school, 2

The summer schools led to the writing and publication of two books based on the Science Across the World programme. Both  are available here on the FACTWorld site in the publications section:

Ethical English

Share Your World

The FACT Group was in part successful due to its strong links with educational establishments in Bulgaria and beyond.

Plovdiv schools inspectors' meeting

Entrance to the courtyard venue for the workshop

You would probably miss the entrance to the courtyard where the Veren Bookshop is located in Sofia if you didn't know where it was. It's a great place for a workshop, they just need internet access! They tell us that it's coming.

One of the many products of the work of the FACT group was the publication of the Kose Bose (The Blackbird and the Fox) children's storybook. You can download the pdf here.

Using Bulgarian folk stories for teaching English

Dr Graeme Jones and DNA model building

We had a number of public Science activities during the initial project which led to the creation of the FACT group. DNA model building was one of them.
Lyubov Dombeva presented about the growth of the IB programme at the Ivan Zlatarski School in Sofia over the last five years. Lyubov teaches on the Biology course in the school's IB programme.

IB at Zlatarski School, Sofia

The old FACTWorld site - www.factbg.hit.bg is no longer valid, but with us in spirit!


We set up a website for Bulgaria to record FACT activities and spread the word.
The link to the FACTWorld Journal page no longer works. 

The move to an international domain at this site factworld.info couldn't have happened without the collaboration of Roy Cross of the British Council who set the wheels in motion for the domain to be bought and the site to be made live.

It's the enthusiasm of the teachers in the network that is the reason for the success and growth of the FACTWorld community. I'm privileged to say that I possibly know personally all of the 3000 plus teachers in our group.

Group work during summer school in Varna

Elka Stavreva sadly couldn't be with us the workshop to blow out the candles, so three of us did it on her behalf. Happy birthday!

White chocolate cake - yes, it was nice!

What did we achieve?
We had a great time. The cake was a cracker!
Actually, the outcomes are equally great. We will start regular meetings of the FACT group once again. The next one will be in November, location to be decided and published here.

We will produce further copies of the popular FACT Journal.
We will investigate sources of funding to support the work of FACT teachers.
We'll start a series of school competitions based around curriculum activities, school links, Science Across the World, and publish the results in FACTWorld.
We will have another party at another key landmark age!
 

The BETA Conference in Plovdiv began on May 3rd with a pre-conference event organized by FACTWorld with a focus on 'Waste in the Curriculum' and we had a rich and fruitful afternoon together. 
We managed to bring together two plenary talks and 4 consecutive workshops focusing on waste and sustainability and considering that this was within a conference for English language teachers, I consider it a great result.
We'll be compiling all the talks and presentations into our next 20th Anniversary FACTWorld Journal.
For now, here are some of the wonderful moments from the event.


Friends waiting for the show to start!

Lovely Lady Lida Schoen helped me with the opening plenary on developing 'Young Voices for Change' through projects.

Stefka Kitanova talked about change and ecology of the last 40 years!

Ventzi and Stan presented Adopt Adata a wonderful project on River Maritsa.

The amazing Patrick Jackson launched Picker Pals here in Plovdiv. It starts here people! 

Waiting for the FACTWorld birthday cake to arrive!

Shopping for cosmetics with microbeads.

Lida looking lovely as ever! x

Opening plenary seflie - Keith and Lida

Speakers' arrival dinner. Cheers!

Egbert Weisheit brought microbeads chemistry to our English language conference.

Exploring mirobeads in cosmetic products.

Smartphone microscope photograph of microbeads in a body scrub.

The Adopt Adata Team (Stanimir Navushtanov and Ventzislav Vassilev)

Lora does a workshop on using natural materials in the language classroom.

Birthday Cheers!

More birthday cheers!

Birthday cheers from Lyubov Kostova, director British Council Bulgaria - cheers Lyubov! x

20 years of supporting content and language integrated learning across the world, now that deserves a slice of cake and a glass of pop! 

Watch this space for materials, presentations and journal from the conference event on 'Waste in the curriculum'.

New course for teachers on creating school links through the curriculum

Plovdiv, July 9th to 17th, 2009

It's great to announce that it is possible from now on to apply for the course:
- Interculturalising Education: Content, Language and Culture for Schools Links and Partnerships.

You’ll find a link to the programme outline below as well as a short version of the ‘highlights'  
This course is supported by the Comenius 2.2/Grundtvig 3 in-service training grant of the European Union. If you wish to participate in this course with the support of these grant schemes please consult the Lifelong Learning National Agency of your country for more information know about the procedures and deadlines.The list of National Agencies across Europe can be found at:  http://ec.europa.eu/education/programmes/llp/national_en.html. If you get stuck with the procedure, just drop us a line and we'll be glad to help if we can.



It's a great course with very ambitious yet important objectives.

Participants will:
- learn about creating schools links and partnerships
- work with colleagues from other countries to set up school links
- begin to prepare proposals for educational funding for school partnerships through the curriculum
- gain experience with a variety of communications technology for supporting their school partnerships
- learn about intercultural communication theory and practice for use in their teaching context
- create learning instruments for their subject area for facilitating curriculum exchange with partner schools in other countries (based on the hugely successful model offered by the popular Science Across the World programme)
- join other colleagues in an exciting public event during the course involving students from local schools aimed at raising public awareness of culture and science
- gain an understanding of the role of language in the curriculum, specifically learn techniques for integrating content and language (CLIL)

For more detailed information go to the Comenius / Grundtvig catalogue description of the course.
The direct link to the catalogue page is:
http://ec.europa.eu/education/trainingdatabase/index.cfm?fuseaction=DisplayCourse&cid=12511


In addition colleagues will enjoy an international dinner with food and drink items from all the participating countries (this is planned to take place at my house in the Rhodope mountains).

The course location:
In the heart of the historic city of Plovdiv in the Thracian plain beneath the Rhodope mountains in the old building of Plovdiv University Paiisi Hilendarski. 



The university is 5 minutes walk from the main pedestrianised street of Plovdiv with easy access to all the sites, amenities and delights that the ancient city has to offer.


Plovdiv central street


The ancient theatre is one of the many hidden treasures in the city.


... as well as the beautiful old town, where we're likely to arrange another of our course dinners.


There will also be an organised guided trip to one of the many wonderful local sites within easy reach of Plovdiv.  Starosel, Perpericon, Chudnite mostove, Bachkovo or others...


Bachkovo monastery

The people:
Keith Kelly, Education Consultant and Course Tutor
Dr Leah Davcheva, Intercultural Trainer and Course Tutor
Dr Lida Schoen, International Trainer and Guest Tutor
Dr Irina Chongarova, Associate Professor Plovdiv University and host
Yana Docheva, Course Administrator, office@ahamoments.eu, +359 898 604 641

The idea:

“It’s about creating real communication in schools.  It’s about using the curriculum, something which our students have to study, to enable them to communicate with students in other countries and share their lives, experiences, their ‘cultures’ and their ideas.”



Summary

In short, it's a course for finding partners, investigating schools exchange projects, discussing materials for research between two schools, producing instruments for exchange, a platform for exchange like you’ll find in the Science Across the World programme, and preparation for school linking via EU funding opportunities. This means that you find colleagues to work with you, prepare the project, learn how to apply, and get started in school linking on the course itself.

Come and join us, we look forward to working with you in Plovdiv, July 2009.
 

ICT in the classroom

Friday, Nov 21st, 2008

We're grateful once again to our host school, Sv Patriarh Evtimii, Sofia 

There was a lot of interest among colleagues at previous workshops for something dealing with ICT in the classroom, especially in the light of the generous gift from the Ministry of Ed to teachers of a free laptop!
I put together the workshop thinking that teachers need quick practical skills and techniques for using the computer to aid their teaching, both in and out of the classroom.

You can download the handout of notes here from the bottom of this page.


You can take a look at the Macmillan catalogue on their site.

With this in mind, we looked first at a number of resources from Macmillan which I'd been given to review. These included:

Busy Board - Interactive whiteboard software (nice and simple story animation, audio, text)
Macmillan English - Primary course integrating content and language (I like the approach to language development through content topics in this course)
CD Dictionaries - The Macmillan Advanced Learners Dictionary (Information on word frequency is useful)
The Business - Sample of this ESP course (Great quality video and exploitation)
Macmillan VPS - Science and Geography (First time we'd presented this stuff in workshop, I always show the total cloze with dictionary, still like that bit very much)
onestopCLIL website - Resources for download, forum, magazine (now in it's fourth month, and growing all the time)

Working with your computer:
In terms of practical tips, we looked at quick ways of making handouts and worksheets. 

You can do simple things like this in 'Paint'



There is a lot of technology around today for grabbing audio and video, and we looked at how this works, as well as how to place supertext or subtitles over film for use in class.  I gave an example with this clip from Burger King available on YouTube.
The task the colleagues had to do was to watch the clip, keeping an eye on the sequence in which things happen.  You can see the edited clip on this site by following this video link.

You can download the text strips here below.

Then, they were given the sequence of events in strips of text which they had to try and rearrange in the order they remember them and using their knowledge of connectors and, of course, the coherence of the events.
 
I use a piece of software called Sony Vegas, but you can add text to film from within Windows Moviemaker as well, and there is a clip explaining how to do this here. 

You can see the clip by clicking the image above.

One of the great things about being able to make material like this is that you can create it exactly at the level of your learners, more text, more visuals, more happening, more talking.
Thanks again to Macmillan for donating a free book to give away, I know from reactions from colleagues that it is very welcome.  That's all the more true in Bulgaria where resources are not easy to get hold of.    

Oh and I almost forgot!  We did this too!
How to type: Put your fingers on the middle row of letter keys with your forefingers either side of the G and H keys (on F and J) and your thumbs resting on the space bar.  Only move those fingers which are closest to the keys you want to type.  If you do a google about typing speed, you'll find that an average speed for a two-finger typing non-professional is below 20 and anyone with a bit of practice can get up to between 20 to 40 words per minute.  Secretaries can work at around 65 to 75 wpm, and advanced skilled typists can perform at 120 or more wpm.  The point, though, is not to make too many mistakes!

 

Keith's Corner
A diary of a school - www.anglia-school.info

31.01.2016

Keith's Corner is a diary written monthly over the course of two years and published on Macmillan's onestopenglish.com.
As well as an interesting insight into setting up and running a school in Bulgaria following a CLIL approach, the diary offers a rich collection of tips and strategies for designing a curriculum for learning English by 'doing something else'.



I created Anglia School with a wish to provide exciting English learning experiences for my daughter, Dara and her best friend Natalia. Creating learning for Dara and Natalia developed into a small group and the school grew from there. At the time of writing, we now have 18 teachers and over 200 children in our classes. And, we plan to grow further. This diary is the story of how we got to where we are today!



Entry 1: Our very own school gives an introduction to Anglia School detailing the processes involved in setting up a new school. Entry 2: Working with tiny tots discusses the importance of communicating with young learners and the need to think on your feet when things don’t go to plan! Entry 3: Keeping it cool shares some favourite tips for calming children down when energy levels are running high. Entry 4: Senses looks at ways of teaching young learners some sensory vocabulary. Entry 5: Autumn seeds uses autumn seeds, nuts and fruits to teach maths and science. Entry 6: Space and stars goes to infinity and beyond with his young learners as they tackle the topic of space. Entry 7: An arctic winter warms up through the winter with an artic-centred theme.



Entry 8: Sports and celebrations bring winter to a close with an action-packed month learning about winter sports and Chinese culture. Entry 9: Pirates and explorers looks at pirates and explorers, where the children even find their very own buried treasure! Entry 10: Snack time discusses Anglia School’s snack-time routine and some useful phrases for when kids want some more … Entry 11: Toddlers and maths offers up some fun ideas as he explains how to teach maths to the youngest learners. Get your triangles at the ready! Entry 12: Dogs at Anglia School explores the theme of dogs. And, they round off the week with a visit from someone special! Entry 13: Maths and pre-school explores the theme of maths by looking at clocks, nature and apples! Entry 14: Design week explains how even the most unlikely of objects can inspire a vast array of language-rich activities when during Design Week at Anglia School they put something old to good use!



Entry 15: Houses at Anglia School is Houses week at Anglia School! Amongst other things, they talk about the different places people live in around the globe, as well as the materials used for construction. Entry 16: Music - it’s music week at Anglia School! The kids learn about classical instruments, work on their rhythm and counting, and make and play instruments of their own. Entry 17: Christmas has lots of fun with Christmas-themed activities – not forgetting those all-important Christmas treats! Entry 18: Dinosaurs - All children love dinosaurs and the children at Anglia School are no different. This month delves into a prehistoric world. Entry 19: Winter - The children at Anglia School have been enjoying a wintery theme in recent weeks. It may be cold outside but, with a host of wintery arts, crafts, songs and stories, the children are as merry as can be! Entry 20: Forest animals invites us to explore the forest and the animals that make it their home. Entry 21: Love - the children at Keith’s school wear their hearts firmly on their sleeves, exploring the related themes of love, affection, respect and politeness.



Entry 22: My body - Action is always an important part of any curriculum for young children. This diary entry shares activities that get children moving and, of course, there’s plenty of language learning to be had along the way. Entry 23: Science - It is great to get kids enthusiastic about science from a young age and there is no better way than through fun experiments. This diary entry shows how to incorporate science into children’s learning so that they can learn through doing, a crucial concept at Anglia School! Entry 24: The learning wheel - The word pedagogy comes from the Ancient Greek word paidagogos, meaning to lead the child. This final instalment explains how the teachers at Anglia School lead their pupils towards learning in English, with the Learning Wheel as their guide.

I'd like to develop classes for children to learn their maths, science, geography and others through the medium of English as they go through school. We're only 3 years old, but as our older children go 'up' the curriculum, Anglia School will have to develop and change to offer more English-medium curriculum opportunities. 

For more information on Anglia School - www.anglia-school.info

A workshop on integrating the teaching of life skills and the English language.


I was asked by Macmillan publishers in Bulgaria to prepare a workshop based on a coursebook, Open Mind, which has at its heart the aim to teach so-called 'soft skills' alongside the English language.
I liked the idea of a curriculum which starts with skills as opposed to lexis/grammar and agreed.
At the time of writing, we've taken the workshop to half a dozen locations around Bulgaria for school teachers and it's gaining in popularity with invitations to run it for University groups as well.

This page describes some of the content and there is a 'walkthrough' video of the workshop slides you can watch on YouTube:



(I hope you'll forgive my coughing, I had a cold.)

The agenda for the workshop was basically to give teachers the chance to explore their understanding of soft skills, or life skills. I also brought some of my own personal life skill stories to tell and along with activities from the Open Mind coursebook, I brought a number of my own activities which I felt develop these skills.

The context for the workshop, and indeed the coursebook, is a Europe with very little professional opportunity for many young people. Youth unemployment is pushing 60% in Spain, for example. At the same time, it's around 10% in Austria. 

What is it then that makes young people more 'mobile' and more 'employable'?
Well, the business community is quite clear about the skills young people need to better their chances of getting a job.


You'll notice that this top ten doesn't include any technical skills at all. In fact, other surveys show that some employers value soft skills higher than specific technical skills, which many employers feel can be taught 'on the job'.

You can add to this list many other interpersonal skills, emotional intelligences, plenty of communication skills (listening!!!!), presentation skills, critical thinking (e.g., evaluating, prioritising), not just working in a team, but being able to work independently, and many, many more.

I presented a model for intercultural communication that I'd learned as an MEd student at Manchester University:



Watch the video to get a clear understanding of what this model involves, but in short, in order to be an effective communicator between cultures, you need to be able to see things from 4 perspectives (how your culture views itself A/A, how the other culture views your culture B/A, how your culture see the other culture, B/B and how the other culture sees its own culture B/B).

Where on earth can you find educational materials which put all of that into practice?

Science Across the World (www.scienceacross.org)



This programme may be familiar to some of you if you visit this site from time to time. There are plenty of reports on FACTWorld about Science Across activities. It's a programme of free learning materials to get learners in different classrooms around the world investigating their own lives (A/A), sharing that with another classroom in a different country which has done the same investigation (B/B) and make comparisons (A/B, B/A).

I won't go into more details here. There are plenty of slides in my PPT that you can download and browse at your leisure. I also plan to do another clip which summarises the Science Across the World programme, projects and materials.

Add to this the FACTWorld email group @ yahoogroups.com and you have all the ingredients you need for putting into practice a whole range of soft skills development work in your classroom.

keithpkelly@yahoo.co.uk

Preparatory Class, EDS Plovdiv, 2008-2009

A lesson preparing for the oral exam - preparing a talk on the topic of travel.

Jan 6th, 2009

The students in the preparatory class have a intensive programme of study for the first year in the English language.  My role working with them is to help prepare them for the oral exam.  I base all my classes on topics provided by colleagues which come from the textbooks used by students and which are generally themes which can be expected to appear in the spoken exam.

language for countries 20 questions

The way the lesson usually goes (when we're not juggling!) is that we discuss the topic in question, compile notes on the board which gives us an idea of the main areas and also a possible structure to the topic for a talk.  We also discuss useful language which students can prepare.

Listening frame for guessing country names

1) Talk about topic, ideas, structure, language
2) Teacher pins up a world map and recounts one or two stories of travel (memorable, food, language) to exemplify the ideas given in 1.
3) Students talk in pairs for two minutes about travel they have made, good-bad, recent-in the past, at home-abroad, with a neighbour and then feed back to the whole class.
4) Students listen to a recording of two people talking about 10 different countries, their outlines, trying to guess which countries they are.
5) Whole class 20 questions activity first of all trying to guess the country the teacher is thinking of, while the teacher can only say 'yes' or 'no'.

Afterwards choose a student to volunteer, while the rest of the class ask the questions.  There is a good language support instrument for this type of activity which I think originally comes from Watcyn-Jones.


6) Homework: go to factworld.info and download the Travel Talk Template to prepare own talk for exam.

Template for talk on the topic of Travel (click below to download)

There are two short clips from my preps talking about their travel experiences here. 

I'll try to get more extended examples on another occasion. I think there is a lot to be said for mp3 recording students in class for use in class and we'll talk about that another time.

PS - we tried a little juggling too

Learning Photography in English

Along with my friend and colleague, Keith Halstead, we’ve put together a course of photography in English starting in September 2015.
Anglia School works mainly with very young children, aged 2 to 10 and we do it well. The young learners groups are largely full and we’ve been oversubscribed for our summer programme too. So, what’s the magic ingredient?

Lora was 4 years old when I popped in to her group, and she’d been with us for several months already. It was an afternoon group and my jaw dropped as I heard Lora say to me ‘Keith, give me that felt tip pen please’, quite spontaneously. It’s quite unlikely that anyone had taught Lora this sentence, what she had done was to pick up this language from the rich language and activity environment that she’d been learning in.

This ‘learning English while doing something else’ is the magic ingredient we have at Anglia School that makes language learning for the children that come to us so easy. With PhotoEnglish what we wanted to do was take this magic ingredient and offer it to adults.

You can download the slides for a closer look at the content by clicking at the link in the image above.

PhotoEnglish is a 12-week course of 2.5 hours per week. Classes are mostly evenings from 5.30 to 8pm but there are 3 weekend meetings during the course which take participants out of the classroom to make use of the natural light of day for making photos. The course costs 300lv.
The focus in the classroom is shared learning. While we do specific a minimum level of English at intermediate level in order that all participants are able to follow the classroom language and language of the teacher, we don’t specific any photography knowledge level or requirement. This means that the participants will learn from each other both in terms of language and content.

We use a communicative methodology incorporating the four language skills (listening, reading, writing, speaking) equally, and with a strong focus on vocabulary development.

In terms of listening, we’ve put together a collection of video tutorials for participants to watch and listen to and develop their own listening skills. There will also be plenty of ‘live’ listening with other participants and with the teachers.

Reading texts are authentic and are integrated with practical activities, so that there is always a ‘read to do’ dimension to the reading.

Speaking activities are largely interactive speaking tasks in pairs, small groups or as a whole class. Participants will be given a lot of opportunity to engage with other participants in English, searching for information they need, for example, in order to be able to carry out a task. Speaking also develops through the many presentation activities participants are asked to carry out. Participants will be asked to give presentations of their work in each class.

Writing activities develop alongside the presentation work and builds on the many descriptive texts the participants meet during the course.
The course will include field trips where participants go out into Plovdiv city to make photographs in the beautiful settings the city has to offer and also to make the most of natural daylight for the purpose of doing great photography.

The course will close with an open exhibition and sale of participants’ photography with the objective of raising funds for a local charity Parallel World.


We had an open event for information on the course at our venue at 35 Dobri Voinikov Street.


Keith explains the practical aspect of the course and how this aids language learning.

I'm including the registration form here below for download. It should be forwarded to info@anglia-school.info. We'll get right back in touch when we receive it.

The Macmillan seminar in Bulgaria took place at the Rila Hotel in the heart of the city of Sofia.

June 12th, 2008

One of the colleagues commented that the hotel was a favourite with the party elite once upon a time and that we may have been working in a room that once hosted the likes of Todor Zhivkov.  We had our own balcony over central Sofia.



There were 22 participants, which was a great turnout considering that we had to change the venue at the last minute.  This happened because of a ‘routine maintenance’ to the electricity supply in the area of town where the first venue had been planned.  It was also a stormy, cloudy, rainy day, but come they did.



Dan gets us started

The topic of the workshop was ‘Projects’.  This has been a regular request from colleagues on the feedback forms of other workshops and as it’s also an area I’m particularly interested in, we put together a 3-hour programme for colleagues on this topic.
It’s a topic which is very diverse, but we focused on four main areas.  We looked at what to do, meaning what topics are there which make good areas for project work.  We looked at what programmes there are to support teachers carrying out project work.  We discussed creating school links as part of project work.  We also looked at how colleagues could create audience for their students’ work, by making use of the various tools and instruments available via the internet.


the Projects PPT handout is available here below

Science Across the World is probably the most well known programme of projects for teachers around the world with its bank of ready-made resources of 16 topics and database of contact teachers and schools now numbering over 6500.
I gave a brief introduction to the programme.
It’s important to point out to colleagues that the registration for the programme at the moment is free.  Normally 20GBP, the fee is wavered while a new corporate sponsor is found.
From experience I know that the best way to get teachers familiar with the Science Across the World programme is to get them to try out some of the tasks and activities in the topics.

The newest topic is ‘All under one sky’ which among other things covers areas related to the solar system and has students create paper  rockets.


The rocket factory


Launching rockets at the Science museum, Berlin

We looked at Keeping Healthy.

In Keeping Healthy one area covered is data concerning fatalities from accidents in young people in Europe and the proportion of this which is caused by road accidents.

As I’d just taught this particular area and mixed it with materials and activities on road safety in my own school, the EDS Plovdiv, I got the participants to discuss road accidents in Bulgaria and carry out the speed reaction test.

I like a lot of the topics and materials in Science Across, but one of my particular favourites is ‘Biodiversity Around Us’.  Next year will see the world celebrate the year of Darwin and the bicentenary of his birthday on Feb 12th.
One of the tasks in Biodiversity is mapping an area of biodiversity for exchange.  The participants looked at a number of samples of maps from schools around the world and then had the task to create their own BioMap of Bulgaria.  There were some wonderful creations.
This topic is particularly significant for many reasons, but Bulgaria has suffered a tragic decrease in the numbers of the Imperial Eagle and Saker Falcon (www.rspb.org.uk).

creating biodiversity maps on Bulgaria

In a workshop that looks at Science Across we had to include Talking about Genetics and the topic of heredity and variation which is a great topic for language work in the classroom.

The colleagues surveyed the variation in the group for hair and eye colour, height, tongue rolling, mid finger hair, ear lobes, and skin colour.
Amazingly, 50% of the group could roll their tongue.  In other groups it’s always been around 85%!

We also looked at What Did You Eat?  This is a topic I first did with own students and I used this particular topic to discuss ways of presenting classroom research data.
It makes sense to pay some thought to presentation because partners involved in school curriculum exchange work won’t be very excited at pages and pages of text and numbers.  My class chose to present their work in the form of a news letter on Eating Habits. You can download the project report from here below.

After all this hands-on work, we asked for a guinea pig in the group to sign up to the programme so that everyone could see how the process works live on the science across site.

Finding partners


Factworld has around 2400 members in its egroup.  The flags page on the website is becoming more populated every year (www.factworld.info).  We talked about where teachers could go to find partners to work with on their potential projects.  FACTWORLD is a great place to look. We also discussed ‘school links’. There are a good many places to look for potential partners. You can start with FACTWorld!

Finally, we discussed how to publish student work on the internet.
Here are a number of ideas.

You can download the complete document at a link below.

It was a great group to close the school year with and they were all warmly invited back in the autumn.  Dan and I are discussing new topics for future Macmillan workshops.  ICT in the classroom has been on the request sheet a number of times, we’ll see what we can do.

Practical Ideas for Teaching Pronunciation in the Classroom

Sofia

Friday, May 29th, 2009

I think this workshop could easily have been renamed ‘YouTube Pronunciation’ as that’s where most the focus examples came from.
  
Host: Patriarh Evtimii Junior School, Sofia

You can download the PPT here below.

Accent Snobbism

We started with a whole group discussion on how people feel about pronunciation, what sort of ideas come into their minds when they hear certain accents, if certain accents can create prejudice, good and bad, and why this is so.

This was contextualised with the Proclaimers’ song 'Throw the R away‘

“I've been so sad Since you said my accent was bad”

I related a personal story from my first year in Bulgaria when I was invited to a party by a colleague from a local school and met his colleagues from the English department. It seemed to be going well, but my colleague told me I’d made an impression on the teachers with my accent. In the kitchen away from my sensitive ear my colleague had been in conversation with an English teacher who had said ‘I hear Keith has a northern English accent, does he have a higher education?’ I’ve got over the feeling of outrage now 20 years later, but it was interesting to hear the colleagues in the workshop relate their own feelings about Bulgarian accents as well as English ones.
 
Sounding Like a Native Speaker

From here we moved on to talk about how important accent is for learners of English. More specifically we discussed how important it is to sound like a native speaker for learners of English in Bulgaria. There is a broad range of literature available on teaching pronunciation and in it we can find a range of different and differing opinions.

Kenworthy says:

‘Learners must be able to cope with linkage, deletions, the ‘blurrings’ at the edges of words…But they do not need to use all these features in their own speech’.  There is a risk of learners sounding ‘false’ or ‘affected’ if they try to incorporate such simplifications in to their speech (1987:79). 

Cockney rhyming slang

you can listen to the clip here

I used a recording of a dialogue with a regional accent, and then asked colleagues to try to identify ‘patterns’ in the dialogue of aspects of the pronunciation of the regional accent. The regional accent I used was Cockney, or East London.

We talked a little about rhyming slang, explained the few examples ‘apples and pairs’ and ‘boat race’ in the dialogue and moving away from slang we looked at examples of elision and assimilation representative of this regional accent, and of other accents around the UK. We talked about the glottal stop and how this makes the sounds of speech very different from what we might expect, or rather from what our learners might expect if they’ve been taught standard RP English, and taught that the English speak the Queen’s English. I’m afraid that we don’t. I suspect that her Highness doesn’t speak the Queen’s English herself either.

Understanding other speakers of English
The point of this exercise is that we can identify ‘patterns’ of pronunciation which differ from standard English and we can raise learner awareness of what to expect to hear, or what not to hear when speaking with other speakers of English.

Brown says:

‘We must prepare a student to do without a number of segmental clues in some parts of the utterance and we need to be able to show him what clues will go and what clues he can rely on finding’, (1990:60).

This was the slogan for a brand of butter I remember hearing, seeing on the TV when I was a boy. I have a memory of it being spoken by a Cockney, it was actually a West Country accent, nevertheless, it’s a good example to give for glottal stops. 
'You’ll never put a better bit of butter on your knife' in standard English would be - | jul ˈnevə ˈpʊt ə ˈbetə bɪt əv ˈbʌtər ɒn jə naɪf | but not when spoken by a cockney!
I read the slogan ‘like the Queen’ and then with a bad impression of a Cockney. 

The aim here isn’t that learners talk like Cockneys, (though the idea sounds fun) but that they have information about speech that allows them to work out what is being said if and when they hear it.

Favourite words
A lot of my students play with English and Bulgarian words. For example,
Question: What is a 'conspirator'?

Answer: It's a horse stopper.

(... ask a Bulgarian!)

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
     
It doesn’t matter if you don’t know this word. It’s not a word you’ll meet in everyday life. It’s just a good word in which to try and place word stress.  

•     How would you read this aloud?
•     How would you read it backwards aloud?

We did just this and then watched the clip from Mary Poppins to check answers.

Getting learners to find odd words, long words words which they just find curious is a good way of raising awareness of patterns of word stress.

You could even make your students read the words with a Cockney accent. No, don’t, that was just a bad joke...

... but there are people who can imitate regional accents without difficulty.    
It’s much more important that learners get their intonation patterns right according to some.

Listener intolerance
     
Tench says there is a level of ‘listener tolerance’ (1983:19) and the ‘threshold of intelligibility’ which our learners must remain within to be understood.  ‘A native speaker of English is more likely to tolerate mistakes in consonants, vowels and word accent than in intonation’ (1983:96).

How can you bring this into your curriculum?

Get students to look for examples within contextualised content tasks to raise awareness of patterns generally in the language.

Time to Think

It’s important that learners get time to think through what they are saying, what they are trying to pronounce accurately. Dalton and Seidlhofer refer to students ‘getting into gear’ (1994:144) and this car metaphor is a useful one when we think of how we drive as a learner

Mirror – Signal - Manoeuvre

Country Names
I noticed that my prep class students had word stress problems with country names and I suspected that the origin of much of it was mother tongue interference. In order to check this I gave them a simple test where they had to mark the word stress of names of countries. I checked the results of the 6 groups (around 170 students) and the results were interesting in that there was a clear case of relying on Bulgarian stress patterns to guess the word stress of the names of the countries. What can we do about this? The first thing I did was to point out the result of the classroom research to the students so that they were aware of what they were doing. I also tried to introduce activities which had students group words into similar stress patterns, thinking that this would help them make decisions in the future.

Germany - Finland - Hungary - Italy - Iceland - Norway - Portugal - Ireland - Switzerland - Russia - Jordan - Afghanistan - Lebanon - Australia 

The Elements
     
One area where students are likely to be confronted with many many word stress decisions is in Science subjects. Biology, Chemistry and Physics are notoriously full of latin and Greek origin words, many of which are very long with many syllables.

You can find dozens in the Periodic Table. 

Where would you place the word stress in the following? 

Neodymium
Astatine
Gadolinium
Molybdenum
Praseodymium
Nobelium


You may know Tom Lehrer’s rendition of the elements, but if you don’t, watch this clip and see if your word stress suggestions above are correct.

Making sounds visual

Kenworthy says (1987:43) ‘One advantage of using drama activities like these is that there is a clear demonstration of the way intonation interacts with gestural and lexical features, which is often lost when only audio-taped material is used.’

I think you can usefully add ‘visual, video, miming activities’ to the above quote. Anything which allows learners to see pronunciation is a good thing.

World of English

you can listen to the clip here

International Words
 
- Хотел, снек бар, пица, хамбургер, in Bulgarian.
- Hotel, snack bar, pizza, hamburger, in English.
- Yes, read the signs, dozens of English words, 'snack bar, sandwich, grill'.
- But 'hotel' is a French word, 'pizza' is an Italian word, 'hamburger' is a German word.
- Hotel, sandwich, pizza and hamburger are international words.
- International words are easy: 'telephone' is телефон, компютър is 'computer'.
- Yes, but 'magazine' is not магазин, 'magazine' is списание.
- Right, telephone and computer are true friends, but magazine is a false friend.
- False friend, oh no.
- Cheer up Martin! Look for the true friends around us.
- Maya is right. Read the signs, telephone, theatre, restaurant ...
 
The text above is an extract from an English language textbook. You can listen to the clip here. The text is very clearly spoken and is scripted with the result that the intonation in places is very different from the way it would be if it were met in the real world. Some of the text sounds like a shopping list being read, for example. This is quite normal as the speakers aren’t trained to make their voices sound like the real thing for the recording. They are teachers.

This is an example (granted, an extreme one) of the kind of material which as Kenworthy suggests lacks the many other signals we have access to when we listen to spoken English in the real world. We discussed this text.

The participants were asked to give suggestions as to what you could do with material like this if you have it in your textbook. They gave many useful suggestions: 

Have students make it meaningful, read it with a more realistic pronunciation;
Have students read it with a different emotion (e.g., anger);
Have students write their own dialogue based on the context of international words;
Give a focus to true and false friends and examine the similarities and differences in pronunciation. 
Keep sounds in chunks
     
Kenworthy says that we should avoid asking learners to produce sounds in isolation because ‘sounds occur in syllables, surrounded by other syllables’ … ‘it’s actually impossible to pronounce some sounds in isolation’ (1987:70).

Working with chunks
 
Watch this clip showing a teacher trying to teach a student how to pronounce this sentence correctly.

•     I would like to buy a hamburger.
 
Would you do it differently? How?
 
Working backwards
     
The teacher in the clip eventually breaks the sentence down into segments and then works incrementally through the whole thing from beginning to end.
 
One suggestion is to work backwards:
 
ger
burger
hamburger
a hamburger
buy a hamburger
to buy a hamburger
like to buy a hamburger
I'd like to buy a hamburger

From brain to mouth

Sound Foundations from Adrian Underhill (1994) creates links between sounds and the mouth, between the brain and the sounds and the muscles in the mouth. You might like to take a look at this as a nice way of visualising pronunciation.

Adrian has learners associate his gestures with sounds, and then explicitly focuses on what physically is happening in the mouth while the sounds are being made.

Points to remember
     
- Try to be understood, not like the Queen!
- Try to understand!
- No sound is an island!
- Present sounds together in chunks!
- Make pronunciation visible (see it)!
- Make pronunciation physical (feel it)!
- Give students thinking time!
 
What can go wrong …
     
There is a bibliography document linked below for anyone interested in reading further.

These two seminars in Bulgaria took place in Sofia and Stara Zagora

The titles were:
- Receptive Skills - Listening and Reading
- Speaking and Drama - Fluency and Accuracy more here

In Receptive Skills - Listening and Reading we discussed what makes a good listener.  In short the conclusion was that a good listener is someone who is good at decoding what they hear to get meaning.

In order to decode what they hear students need to filter through a vast amount of sound to get to the meaning.  This workshop looks at what the vast amount of sound includes and how this can be brought into the classroom to develop listening skills in our learners.

We did this specifically by listening to short clips of recordings and then describing the sounds we could hear.

colleagues in Stara Zagora get to grips with interactive reading tasks

The clips came from a range of textbooks and materials on the market.    

Listen to the clips and ‘describe’ what you hear:
Cockneys (00.05 – 01.45)
Diane Abbot (02.06 – 03.12)
World of English 1 (03.20 – 04.18)
Castaways (04.22 – 05.17)
World of English 2 (05.18 – 06.34)
Which country is it? (06.39 – 12.31)
Holidays (12.39 – 13.11)

We looked at accent and discussed how this can cause difficulties for listeners decoding meaning.

'Yeah, well talkin’ about it Toni, there’s me cousin, right, dja, you know Jimmy, don’tja? 
Yeah. 
An’ he came down the other week. 
He’s a nutter. 
He is.  I’ve never known a Cockney like ‘im.  He’s goin’ round sayin’: ‘goin’ out tunoit’ an’ all this, you know, he goes round like that.'

   
... and colleagues had a go at Cockney themselves.  The colleagues identified elision, assimilation, interruption, speed, slang and many other characteristics of this speech.

We listened to a real interview between a politician and a journalist from a EFL publication on the market.



Here, colleagues suggested that the speech was a formal radio interview and this explained the slower interaction between interviewer and interviewee.  There was a discussion about the role of sentence stress for highlighting meaning in speech.  Here, the politician frequently blurred parts of her speech while stressing and pronouncing clearly the meaning carrying words.

''International words are easy.  Telephone is telephone, computer is computer. 
Yes, but magazine is not magazine, magazine is spisanie. 
Right, telephone and computer are true friends, but magazine is a false friend.''

With another recording from a Bulgarian publication we talked about the effect multiple speakers have on the difficult for decoding meaning.  This particular recording offered seven speakers and a dog!  There was discussion about the need for clarifying the division between pronunciation (accuracy) and listening (fluency) materials.


We listened to another recording which used actors, or so we thought, was not scripted, and though there was quite a lot of 'real world' sounds in the recording, the feeling was that it still wasn't 'quite right'.  It still sounded a little bit false.


Another recording offered a professional recording, by this we mean that there were what appeared to be trained actors, the speech was unscripted, or perhaps semi-scripted.  This recording had a male trying to identify countries from their outlines and a female guiding the male through his task and then giving the corrections.

We summarised some of the characteristics of 'real world' speech we thought our students need to decode in order to get to the meaning of what they hear.  The challenge to teachers is to bring this into the classroom so that learners can become adept at filtering and getting at the meaning.    
accent, dialect, colloquialisms 
intonation 
speed 
silence 
interruption 
monologue, dialogue, plurilogue 
overlapping 
elision (dropping sounds) 
assimilation (blending sounds) 
errors 
repetition 
context 
background noises 

DIY listening.  There was agreement that textbook materials don't always provide the best input listening experiences for students to develop these skills.  I suggested that perhaps the teacher can do a better job.
I still think this is the case and am waiting to be convinced otherwise.

Teachers can produce better listening experiences by using their own speech in the classroom.  They can do this by using 'semi-scripts', a term which I think comes from Marion Geddes in the late 70s, in order to 'approach authenticity' which is a good as it can get in the classroom.
The great thing about content material is that they are full of diagrams, illustrations and pictures which can be used as the 'semi-script' both for the teacher to deliver the input speech, and for the learners to use as a frame for listening.

There are many tasks students can do in this context.

Types of listening activities:
Listen and do
Label
Make notes
Rearrange
Reorder
Sort 
Identify
Stage a process
Gap fill
 
I followed the same idea in talking about organising reading tasks for learners.  There are many types of reading to be found in coursebooks, we looked only at 'information transfer' tasks.
The reason for this is that the 'processing of input reading text' is at the core of integrating content and language methodology.  Students need to get to the most important content and summarise it, rearrange it, learn it in as easy a way as possible.

Setting up info transfer goes some way to providing students with a view of the core of a content topic area as well as a means for organising this content.


Pharmacology lecture notes

I like to use material from my wife's education.  She is a Paediatrician.  The excerpt above is from her pharmacology notes.  There were 20 pages like this.  It's one long linear text.  You can just imagine the professor giving the lecture and my wife writing as much as she, as quickly as she can.  When it came to learning the material, my wife was having problems learning the material.  I offered to help, and once we'd agreed that I don't know the slightest thing about pharmacology, we began to look at the structure of the content.


With some discussion we managed to produce this diagram.  The linear text of 20 pages is in fact a large tree diagram which shows types of medical substances and the effect they have on different nerve groups.  There is also the names of the drugs on the market.  The only thing missing is the dosage.  It took my wife half an hour to memorise the 'picture' we'd created.
I'd go as far as to say that the professor (never met him/her) would have been doing a better job had they actually given the students the diagram in the first place before the lecture began.  The professor, no doubt, would argue that this isn't his/her job.

In a foreign language, content like this must be structured as simply as possible to allow students easy access to it.  As we can see here, even in MT, it's difficult to listen and take notes, and then learn linear 'text'.

On a much simpler level, card sorting in the classroom is one way of getting students to read and discuss and organise text according to decisions they make about content and logical structure.

This example is from Geography.

Students read, discuss and sort the text depending on they decisions they make about coal as a source of electricity.

Diet and disease
Certain diseases, such as coronary heart disease, breast
cancer and bowel cancer are more common in some
countries than in others. It is thought that some of these
diseases may be linked to diet. Below is some information
about them.
Obesity
People who weigh 20% more than the ideal are overweight.
They have a shorter life expectancy and are more likely to
suffer from diseases that include heart disease, diabetes,
gallstone, high blood pressure, arthritis and varicose veins.
Some people put on weight easily. The reasons are not
understood. They do not necessarily eat more than other
people, but they eat more than they need and lay down the
excess as fat.
 
(this is just a short part of the whole text which is from the Science Across the World topic 'What did you eat?')    I used this example as a linear text and asked colleagues to identify a generic structure in the text.


The best diagram I've come across to accompany this text, is this tree diagram / flow diagram, where the flow describes cause and effect.

-----

Speaking and Drama
We started the discussion by focusing on the difference between fluency and accuracy in oral production.

This was to set out some descriptors of what we mean by fluency and accuracy in the classroom and what is the role of each in terms of language development.

Some of the suggestions from the teachers to describe tasks which focus on accuracy in speaking were:

•- Pronunciation
•- Reading aloud
•- Reading answers to a task
•- Careful talking
•- Well-thought out
•- Well-structured
 
Some of the suggestions from the teachers regarding tasks focusing on fluency in speaking were:

•- Looking for information
•- Sharing information
•- Quick exchanges
•- Two, three more people
•- Not worrying about making a mistake
•- Keeping the flow going

This workshop aims at bridging the gap between accuracy and fluency.

Question loops
any situation where you have questions and answers, or terms and definitions, or halves of sentences, or two-clause sentences separated by linking phrases etc, can be exploited to create a question loop.
 

It's very easy to make a question loop.  All you need to do is type your questions and answers into a table with two columns with the questions and answers on the same row, but in different cells.  Then mark all of the answers and move them down one row.  Then cut the last answer and move it to the top row.  Print them off and hand out one row to each student.  They read their question, someone else answers, reads their question and so on, till you get back to the beginning. (Many thanks to Nigel Heslop for this task.)

Info gap


An information gap can be made with any visual with labels copied twice one for student A and the other for student B.  Each visual has different information missing so that students, who aren’t allowed to show each other their visual, must speak to each other to fill in the missing information from their diagram.

Information Search
This is similar to question loop in that this activity suits information in the question and answer format but where the information is organised in ‘three things you know’ and ‘three things you want to know’.

In an information search, there are 6 or more cards with information around the class and students have to find the information missing from their cards by asking the right questions.  If they are asked for information and they have it on their card, they give the information.
(watch out for this kind of thing at www.onestopenglish.com/clil)

Question help

What is the location of...? / Where is ... situated?
What is the distance of ... from the Sun? / How far is ... from the Sun?
What is the temperature / mass / atmosphere / core of...?
What is the atmosphere / core of ... made up of?
What does the atmosphere / core of ... consist of?
What is the planet ... named after? / Where does the name ... come from?
What else can you tell me about ...?
 

Answer help

... is located / is found / is situated
The distance between ... and the Sun is ... / The distance of ... from the Sun is ...
... has a temperature of ... / from ... to ... / ... varying between ... and ... / ranging from ... to ...
... has a mass of ... point ... times ... to the (power of) ... kilos
... has a (very thick / thin / poisonous) ... atmosphere (made up of ...)
... has a core made up of ... / which is made of ... / consists of ...
... is named after
It is also ... / It also has ... / It also ...

Word guessing games
Prepare a sheet of vocab and put the class into teams.  Each team has one minute to guess as many words as possible and they get one point for each correct guess. 


Class surveys
Use questionnaires to guide pupils in asking set questions of their classmates.


(From Watcyn-Jones)

Making presentations / talking from a prompt
Instruct pupils to present information from a visual using language support handout.



Drama
We also did a bit of drama.  The play we did as an example of what is possible in the space of a 40 minute lesson was 'The Plague at Eyam' from the Science Year CD. This is all archived at the ASE STEM site.


Repetition and rehearsal – opportunity for combination of accuracy and fluency
–- Check the roles
––- Discuss the characters
––- Other ‘parts’ to play, rags, boxes, doors
––- Discuss setting - background
––- Share roles – two students together
––- Give time to rehearse, think about voice
––- Think about sound effects
––- Film scenes / mp3 record scenes

You can download the play from here, browse the ASE STEM site for Science Yr for more.

The seminar was delivered in Haskovo

June 5th, 2008

We were hosted by the Asen Zlatarov School in Haskovo and teachers came from all the Science subjects, Biology, Chemistry, and Physics and a English language teaching colleague came all the way from Dimitrovgrad for the workshop.

The contents of the workshop were the same as with the first receptive skills workshop.



Yordan provided two copies of the Science VPS publication so that both the Science colleagues from the host school and the visitor from Dimitrovgrad could take one back to their school.



We looked at a variety of techniques for guiding learners through listening input and reading input



I showed some of the materials on the Macmillan Science VPS DVD

This seminar was delivered Varna and Burgas, Bulgaria.
29th May, 2008

It's been about 5 years since I was last in Varna and so it was nice to return and to meet up with a large group of teachers, a good number I already knew.
Yordan Stoyanov, Dan, Macmillan rep in Bulgaria, booked us into the Aqua Hotel in Varna.

Handing out materials as people arrived.



We sang a song to get started.  It integrated listening and reading, the topic of the workshop, and breaks the ice.

The interactive reading tasks are the same as those used for the first receptive skills workshop which colleagues can read about on this site.

Sorting info cards into logical structures

The discussion was lively.  Do textbooks offer what students need to become good listeners?  I suggest that teachers can do a better job with their own live monologues.

As usual there was a prize draw for a copy of the Science Vocabulary Practice Series.  It's great that this time it went to a colleague working in a school where students study their Science through English.
Thanks Macmillan, and thanks to the colleagues for their energy.

The 8th Macmillan Workshop in Bulgaria, Burgas

30th May, 2008

It was great to be hosted by a real school.
We held the workshop in the Bratya Miladinovi Junior School and so thanks to the school for having us.  You can find out about the school, newly refurbished at their site:

http://www.miladinoviengl.hit.bg/

The topic of the workshop was receptive skills and so rather than repeat all of the content and describe the materials again, interested colleagues can take a look at the report for Workshops 4 and 5.

Short clip explaining the origin of the FACTWorld network.

Lesson on Tertiary Economy, Tourism and Development
Velingrad, 21st May, 2009
 
I had an invitation recently to give a Geography lesson in the Technical School for Tourism and Economics in the Bulgarian Rhodope mountain Spa town of Velingrad.

The school was interested in offering an open lesson to its teachers and others a focus lesson with innovative communicative ideas based on the content curriculum they teach. I decided to give a lesson on the Pros and Cons of tourism. Given the growth of tourism in the town in recent years, this seemed to be an appropriate topic.

Krastina and Dara came with me as we’d decided to make an excursion of it and stay for the weekend. It was a good decision. Dara loved the water.
I arrived at the school in the early afternoon and as Elena, my school contact, organized the media – we had the local TV station and the local press – as well as a large number of teachers from the school to observe.
 
As we were a little bit early, I got the students, aged 15-17, to tell me their names which I drew on a map of the classroom to help me refer to them by name during the course of the lesson. I can still remember there were Yanko, Yordanka, Georgi, Seeka (thanks for lending me your watch!), Eva, Alex and others.
 
Elena had specifically asked me to try to include some interactive multi-media in the lesson and referred to the Geography VPS CD, so I used that ....

I used it to warm up the students' background knowledge and vocabulary of the topic.
 
The school itself is an interesting place with a special role in the education of local young people. It is special because the Spa town of Velingrad is officially the Spa Capital of Bulgaria. The school teaches a number of specialized areas such as waitering, front desk hotel management, kitchen staffing, among many others.
 
I wanted to use activities that would make the students talk and talk they did! Bravo to all the students who took part!
We did a vocabulary activity where they had to guess which terms I described in teams, correct guesses getting a point.
The vocabulary sheet is here below for download.

I was given a short tour of some of the classrooms and found that the school had a fully equipped commercial kitchen, a bar-restaurant, and a caffeteria which are used to train the students in a variety of skills.

I got the students to carry out a read and sort task from the VPS  Geography book which related tourism to development in Mallorca.

Reading and writing key information using a note taking frame
 
We also did a task from the same book on arguments for and against tourism. Instead of doing the task as a simple reading though, I asked the students in groups to sort the text into a table which I prepared. This way they had to discuss the arguments  in their groups before sorting them.
The teachers who organised my visit were particularly interested in investigating the possibility of offering more of the curriculum through English.  At the moment the content teachers don’t have the language ability to offer their subjects through English and so the idea is that the language teachers work alonside the subject teachers in offering an ESP-type provision. There is clearly a lot of scope for this approach in this school.

The students had to discuss pros and cons of tourism for development in the form of a post-its debate.

Arguments for and against
In the end the board had clusters of statements which can then be generalized into arguments both for and against the theme or topic in question - here tourism and development. This is a relevant theme in Bulgaria where development has been a little out of control in the tourist areas around the country.
I also gave the students a handout with 'The language of arguing' (document attached below). We didn't do anything with this in class, but I thought it would be useful in case any of the students actually took me up on my 'homework invitation'. I invited students that if they wanted, they could write a discursive essay on this topic 'Is development through tourism a good or a bad thing?' 450 words and I gave them my email. If they write it and send it in I'll check, mark and send it back.
I’ve also promised to see what I can do to help the school develop links with other schools with a similar profile in other countries. It makes sense for the school to seek out similar schools to share ideas and practice as there is a lot of good practice in education in hospitality services in a number of European countries.
We also talked about resources. It’s a simple problem. The school doesn’t have English-medium materials for hospitality services education. I said I’d try and find out what’s available. It may be that colleagues in other countries.

Thanks and good-byes after the lesson.
The lesson:
 
Names
 
1 Warm up - quick test on tertiary economy
 
We showed students a sample from the Macmillan Geography VPS CD for Topic 14 activity 2. One of the nice aspects of this task is the possibility to be able to draw up a glossary for the topic, hear a pronunciation of the word and see a simple definition.
 
6 multiple choice questions, students do in pairs, hand their answer to another pair, we mark together
 
2 Core vocabulary
 
Team word race
Teacher gives definitions on words seen on screen, team 1 guesses which words, gets one point per correct word, then team 2, until all words have been guessed, points counted

((a clip from this task))
 
3 For and against tourism
 
The text for this task comes from the Macmillan Geography VPS topic on Tertiary Economy. Instead of using the text as a linear reading task I decided to prepare it as a group reading and sorting task.  Here the students worked in pairs, threes or fours to rearrange the text into the correct order in a table of arguments for and against tourism. After the students had finished we went through their answers where individuals read their solutions talking both for and against a certain aspect of tourism.
 
4 Post its debate
Students get one post it, and a pen, they write an argument against tourism, stick it on the board, we continue till all students have posted on argument
Students get one post it, they write an argument for tourism, stick it on the board, we continue till all students have posted on argument
 

a short clip from this task

5 discuss writing this into a discursive essay, using the language of arguing
 
The students did a grand job. One of the teachers came up afterwards and said that they hadn’t spoken so much in the whole of the year. I was a little bit worried that they would be overwhelmed by all the adults, the camera and the press in the room, but they got into the lesson and did a great job. There were many other memorable aspects of the trip for me: My daughter shouting ‘pluva’ in the pool of the hotel when she wanted us to help her ‘swim’ in the water; the circus we visited and Dara dancing at the ringside; the school invited us back for banitsa the next day and they make their own fresh cheese pastry everyday so that was special too.
 
I’m sure we’ll be back and we’ll hear from this school again. I think I'd go back just for the banitsa!

This event is old news, but I came across a paper photo of the group which is such a lovely reminder that I thought I'd put it here just in case any of the group are visiting and might like a copy.

This was one of our first major activities which brought together colleagues from all over Europe and which led to the creation of the FACTWorld website and some of the initial texts for participant countries are still here behind their country flags.



 

Maths and Science Education in Bulgaria     

With the election of a new government in Bulgaria and the possibility of a concerted effort to bring good management to a country desperate to see exactly that, I put this page together to satisfy my own curiosity.
 
It sets out how Bulgaria has been performing in Science and Maths since 1995, at least according to the PISA and TIMSS data.
 
It's an understatement to say that the new government has a lot to do for Science and Maths education in Bulgaria. We expect Mrs Fandakova to be Education Minister, good luck to her. I think she'll need it!
 

Greaney V & T Kellghan 2008 Assessing National Achievement Levels in Education, International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank
 
Results for the 2003 grade 8 mathematics test (TIMSS) 476
Bulgaria 'significanly above international average' 467
 
Results for 2004 Reading Achievement in Grade 4
Bulgaria came second in the survey showing students reaching PIRLS Benchmarks

Gregory K 2006 A method for monitoring sub-trends in country-level mathematics achievement on TIMSS, International Education Journal, Shannon Research Press
 
Shows percentage of students below the International Mathematics Mean (500) in TIMSS 1995, 1999, 2003
 
1995 - 40.55 527
1999 - 43.91 511
2003 - 60.37 476


UNICEF Country Profile on Education in Bulgaria
As of 14th July 2009
 
Gives performance of Bulgaria on the PISA 2006 in Participating Countries in the CEE/CIS Region.
Shows poor performance in comparison with countries in the region.

Education at a Glance 2008, OECD INDICATORS
 
Parents’ reports of child’s past science reading and student performance on the PISA science scale (2006)
This chart shows the performance difference on the science scale between students.
 
Shows a marked difference in achievement when scores are differentiated according to student socio-economic background.
 
Generally poor results when parents asked about standards and quality of education, Bulgaria ranks worst in the table for parents satisfaction with reporting on student progress and monitoring of progress.

TRENDS IN INTERNATIONAL MATHEMATICS AND SCIENCE STUDY
2007 TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center
 

Shows charts and countries for Mathematics and Science Achievement at the 8th Grade.
 
BG Maths 464/500
BG Science 470/500
 
TRENDS IN INTERNATIONAL MATHEMATICS AND SCIENCE STUDY
2003 TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center
 

Shows summary of trends, improving or declining
 
Bulgaria shows poor results in both Maths and Science 

Highlights From TIMSS 2007: Mathematics and Science Achievement of U.S. Fourthand
Eighth-Grade Students in an International Context, December 2008
 
Patrick Gonzales
Project Officer
National Center for Education Statistics
 
Gives comparative analysis of US achievement, Bulgaria can be seen alongside this.
Shows Bulgaria with 63 point drop in Grade 8 Maths achievement between 1995 and 2007, the worst in the chart.

Supplementing your primary classroom.

I was asked to prepare a workshop for Macmillan in Bulgaria with a focus on ideas and resources for primary teachers to move learning beyond their classrooms.

There is a flier here and invitation for the upcoming workshops in Varna (Nov 19th and Burgas Nov 20th 2015).

I'll write up some notes on the workshops and the content after the events.

For now, get in touch with Yordan Stoyanov and register at the link below if you'd like to join us. If not, please pass on to your colleagues.
www.macmillan.bg/seminars 


 

Summer Course - Varna '2004

“FACT IV” - CREATE CULTURE THROUGH SCIENCE: WATER
Networking and Training for Content and Language
Integrated Learning
(05.07 - 09.07.2004)
 
Organizers: Forum for across the Curriculum Teaching Group and Science across the World
Partners: The Ministry of Education and Science, Shumen University Konstantin Preslavski and 
In-service Teacher Training Department - Varna

Course Content
Albena Nikolova   
•Water in Bulgarian Literature – Creative Writing

Lyubov Dombeva
•Water experiments
•Beliefs about Water – Developing Listening Skills in EL

Maria Koeva
•WaterDoc Comes to Help

Stefka Kitanova   
•SAW
•FACT – Content Process and Product of the Project
•Water experiments continued

Valentina Angelova – Course Director
•Developing Language Skills while Focusing on Science,

Literature and Culture (Water Variations)
•The Cross-curricular Approach in Teaching English as a FL
‘Testing’ Water


The team
Lyubov – the Lotus
Albena – the Albatross
Merry Maria
Emilia – the Eagle
Detelina – the Dog
Tsveti – the Tulip
Svetlana – the Sun
Iva – the Ice cream
Valya – the Vitamin
Krassimira – the Key
Elvira – the Experience
Julia – the Jacket
Stefka – the Snake


Participants Contacts

Детелина Йорданова Маринова – англ. ез
Гр. Велико Търново 5000, ул. “Камен Зидаров” 14
Detelina@vali.bgЕлвира Дамянова – англ. ез., руски ез.
Гр. Свищов, ул. “Средна Гора” 1
Вх. Г, ап. 15
D_blagoev@thezonebg.comЕмилия Христова Дишева - математика
Гр. Велико Търново, 5000, ул. “Краков” 5
Вх. В, ап. 4, ет. 2
Emilydisheva@abv.bgИва Симеонова Рангелова – англ. ез.
Гр. Севлиево, 5400, ж.к. “Димитър Благоев”
Бл. 3, ап. 2, вх. Г, ет.1
Evgeni_68@abv.bgКрасимира Кирчева Крумова – англ. ез.
Гр. Свищов, 5250, ул. “П. Евтимий” 72
Бл. 2, вх. Б, ап. 12, ет. 4
Krrass@abv.bgСветлана Пламенова Стойчева – български ез, история, англ. ез.
Гр. Тутракан, обл. Силистра, бл. “Росица”2
Ет. 4, ап. 10
Jovkov@mail.orbitel.bgЦвета Александрова Кръстева – изобразително изкуство
и история на изкуството
Гр. Велико Търново 5000, ул. “Оборище” 8
Вх. Г, ап. 21
Тел. 0889 274 783
www.cveta.net
cveta_26@yahoo.com
mail@cveta.netЮлия Петрова Йозова – англ. ез.
Гр. Свищов, 5250, ул. “П. Ангелов” 15
Бл. 1, вх. Г, ет. 5
Тел. 0631 42246, 0888 777 366
D_blagoev@thezonebg.com


 Tutors contacts
Albena Nikolova – albenahris@yahoo.comLyubov Dombeva – dombeva@abv.bgMaria Koeva - maria_koeva@yahoo.comeng. Stanislav Shterev – stan_sterev@abv.bg – 9010 Varna, ITTDStefka Kitanova - skitanova@scienceacross.org , butsa13@hotmail.comValentina Angelova – 9010 Varna, ITTD, valka55@hotmail.com

Group poems
WATER

It looks like crystal
It sounds like waterfall
It smells like perfume
It provokes me to dream
(Svetlana)

It looks like waves
It sounds like roaring sea
It smells like seaweeds
It provokes you to swim
(Iva – the Ice cream)

It looks like the rising tide
It sounds like the splashing mermaids
It smells like the cool breeze
It provokes myths and legends
(Lyubov)

It looks like a mirror
It sounds like music
It smells like a rose
It provokes my spirit
(Julia)

It looks like transparent air
It sounds like birds singing
It smells like perfume after rain
It provokes swimming
(Albena)

It looks like a blue transparent sky
It sounds like a beating chord in love
It smells like the hair of a baby
It provokes like the smile of a beautiful woman
(Tsveta)

It looks like silver
It sounds like music
It smells like spring
It provokes you to dream (= to live)
(Elvira)

It looks like nylon curtains
It sounds differently –
as a lullaby song and as a thunder storm
It smells like sea J
It provokes you to desire it
(Emily)

It looks like air
It sounds like waves
It smells like sea
It provokes drinking
(Merry Maria)

It looks like winter
It sounds like spring
It smells like autumn
It feels like summer
It provokes changes
(Stefka – the Snake)



HAIKU POEMS

Rainbow is colourful
Colours are joy
Joy is peace
(Iva – the Ice cream)

Dewdrops
Silver dewdrops, golden rays
Dancing stars in moonlit pit
Distant sound of ringing bells
For the one who wants to hear it
(Detelina)

Water is a symbol of life
People are a symbol of life
So, People are a symbol of water
(Elvira, Emily, Merry Maria)

If waterless – I die,
If waterfull – I exist,
I choose – to live!
(Elvira, Emily, Merry Maria)

My water
Your water
Water for you and me
(Julia)

If a drop of water is love
And the river is life
I am an Ocean
(Krassi – the Key)


I saw the rainbow
It was from five colours
The colours of rainbow
(Svetlana)

Water is life
Ice is death
Vapour is in between
(Stefka – the Snake)

Water dripping off my hair
Makes me remember your smile
(Lyubov)

Waterfall in front
Water denying stillness
Breaking the silence
(Albena)

Rivers flow like golden paths,
Cascade down the mountainside
Chasing peace.
Deserts, stagnant seas of light,
Never get that kiss of life.
Water is pleasure in hot summer night
It is an enigma, a secret
And a kind of life’s fight.
(Krassi – the Key, Iva – the Ice cream, Emilia – the Eagle,
Lyubov – the Lotos, Stefka – the Snake)




Water is a source of life,
 Water is a state of mind
 It is placid, running fast
 It is beauty longing last
 Pleasure for my senses
 Inspiration for my dances!
(Merry Maria, Elvira – Experienced, Svetlana, Albena, Julia, Detelina)
 

WATER
 
It looks like a smile of a newborn baby
 With pure and full of goodness minds,
 Clear from the surrounding evil and
 Troubles in life
 It sounds like a bird flying free in the sky,
 Singing under the sun
 Not disturbed by the disastrous activities
 Of the surrounding life
 It smells like flower growing
 In calm and sunny place
 With odour of green and beauty nature
 Reflecting one world of with clear environment.
 It provokes the best sides of the person’s nature
 To come out and show the world
 How good we can be
 If we want.
 (Krassi – the Key)

Download the "Varna Summer Course 2004" in Word format below

Vocabulary Seminar, Blagoevgrad
 
March 21st, 2008
 
We set off from Sofia in the snow and arrived to the sunshine in southern Bulgarian town of Blagoevgrad.
The beautiful former Solunska Gimnazia hosted the workshop 

We looked at vocabulary and it was great to see 18 teachers turn out for the meeting among whom we had Science, IT, English and Business Studies teachers present. 

Yordan presents the Science Vocabulary Series

Colleagues consider the frequency of words in a general science text.  
    
In addition to the content of Plovdiv and Sofia, colleagues were also asked to recreate linear text from wordmap input.  This took the form of a wordmap on wealth and poverty and the teachers were asked to try and follow the logic of the structure of the map to make sentences to express the ideas in the content. 

Smiling to the end...
 
 ... and Macmillan sent me this link to a film they made of me introducing the Science Vocabulary Practice Book and CD!  


The photo opens a link to the YouTube clip.

I wish I'd known they were going to do this, I'd have worn something different! 

School visit and Macmillan vocabulary workshop, Sofia.
March 14th, 2008

I received a warm invitation to visit the Ivan Zlatarski IB school in Sofia (http://www.zlatarskischool.org). 
This is a very interesting school from a CLIL perspective in that it offers English-medium subject teaching on the road to IB exam qualifications.


One of the two buildings on the campus


Year 10 Biology / English

I co-taught with colleague Dobri for two lessons while at the school with a year 10 group which has their Biology through the medium of English.
We spent the two lessons working on the topic of Acid rain.

Reading and discussing coal as a fuel

Many thanks to the school for hosting me.  I'm sure I'll be back there soon.  This is something to watch out for.  I think more and more schools will set up shop like this as more students and parents request English-medium education.  At the moment though Ivan Zlatarski School is one of a kind in Bulgaria.

We continued the Macmillan tour to The Department of Information and In-service Training of Teachers, Sofia
March 14th, 2008

It was a pleasure to come back to the In-service Training Institute in Kniazhevo in the shadow of Vitosha mountain.

I had started working in CLIL training at this very institute with an in-service training course for teachers many years ago.

Yordan gets the show on the road...    


It was a tremendous turnout with over 50 teachers squashed into the boardroom at the institute.
The colleagues were very interested in the catalogue of resources provided by Macmillan.

I delivered similar content to the workshop in Plovdiv a few weeks ago.

But this time I focused more on the Science Vocabulary Practice Series resource.  One of the instruments on the CD is a total cloze activity.

Which students use to fill in text on a given topic.    
students can use the task on the CD alongside the topic word list and look up words while doing the task.

... or, they can ask for words to be given...    
... or the rest of the text can be made to appear if they get completely stuck.

You may remember this from the 'Hidden Text' software which is still available from the materials section of this site, under 'computers'.

We also looked at the tool for creating word maps on the CD.  This enables students to create their own maps for a specific topic area and save it and export it to an external programme to edit.    


Yordan even had a free copy of the book and CD to give away to a lucky winner in a tombola at the end of the workshop.

 

The seminar tour started in The English - German School, Plovdiv, Feb 22, 2008     

Many thanks to Marianna Gencheva, senior English Expert at the Regional Inspectorate of Education in Plovdiv for her assistance in making this even happen and bringing in nearly 30 teachers to the workshop.
The topic of the workshop was 'vocabulary'.

Many thanks to Marianna Gencheva, senior English Expert at the Regional Inspectorate of Education in Plovdiv for her assistance in making this even happen and bringing in nearly 30 teachers to the workshop.
The topic of the workshop was 'vocabulary'.

Marianna and Yordan wish I'd stop taking pictures...

It's great to be able to participate in something like this.  Some of you may know that I worked for 8 years at the English-German School in Plovdiv and this was a great opportunity to meet up with former colleagues and friends.In fact, I spoke with school director, Valentin Karaminev, about coming back and since have arranged to go in to the Prep classes once every two weeks to help with the work of the 6 colleagues who teach their.  I'll report on how that goes.

Very bad technique standing in front of the projector...

=13pxI'd prepared my workshop based on work with subject teachers and the difficult job they have in dealing with the heavy load of new words each class that they have to teach to their learners.

Though I had my materials ready, Yordan Stoyanov - macmillan_bg@abv.bg, sent me a chapter from the Scrivener publication 'Learning Teaching'.  The chapter was on vocabulary.

I followed ideas from Scrivener in my presentation.

You can download the PPT here below if interested.

I particularly liked what Scrivener writes about organising words to facilitate learning and so I rewrote my workshop to incorporate many of his ideas.
One of these was the idea of mapping words.  I decided to prepare a mind map based on the chapter.

You can download the mindmap from here below.


We covered many things, concordancing, total cloze tasks, concept mapping software, discourse analysis, terrible materials students are expected to work with in learning in English and many others.But I don't want to give all my secrets away!  You'll have to get in touch and ask me if you'd like to know more, or better still come along to one of the workshops.  Next stop Sofia at Knazhevo TT institute on 14th March.After that, Blagoevgrad on the 21st March.
 

World Sustainable Development Week!
Zlatarski School, Sofia
19th to 23rd Oct, 2009

Many thanks to colleague Lyubov Dombeva for keeping us up to date with what has been going on in her school. In fact, the whole team of teachers involved in Zlatarski School's initiatives for this important week should be applauded.

You can read about what they did and more from the latest issue of their school newsletter which you can download here below.

Café CLIL - A place to come and talk about (and listen to) the issues.

The recordings you will find here are all from volunteers interested in the area of foreign language medium education.  The Café CLIL discussions began in December 2008 simply as a way of promoting sharing and discussion of the issues related to work in the area of Content and Language Integrated Learning in a relaxed atmosphere.  Hence the name, Café CLIL.  So, get yourself a cuppa, tea, coffee, or whatever you prefer, and join us.

Discussion 18: Moving to English-medium Education

Recent developments around the world in terms of English-medium education, the question of 'legality' when young people are taught through another language, and tips and advice for anyone (read any school systems) thinking of going English-mediu.

Discussion 17: English in the Wider World

This discussion has come from suggestions from colleagues that English is no longer a school subject but is a life skill that people employ around the world in their everyday lives beyond the classroom walls.

Discussion 16: Hard and Soft CLIL Teacher Skills

This discussion revolves around the issue of dealing with more than one language in the CLIL classroom. It's a theme which is chosen specifically to contrast with a total immersion approach.

Discussion 15: Two Languages in the CLIL Classroom

This discussion revolves around the issue of dealing with more than one language in the CLIL classroom. It's a theme which is chosen specifically to contrast with a total immersion approach.

Discussion 14: Re-defining CLIL (Defining CLIL again)

This discussion is a revisit to CLIL terminology, methodology and contexts based on developments over the last two years of Café CLIL discussion.

Discussion 13: Content and Language Integrated Learning and Young Learners

An important theme which focuses entirely on issues related to integrating the curriculum and foreign languages with young learners. Am sure there will be a lot of debate with this theme.

Discussion 12: The language of content - Mathematics Topic (Averages: Data Handling)

Reporting back on conferences and meetings; discussion on the language of the Mathematics topic Averages: Data Handling, demands on learners, strategies and techniques for dealing with this language in the CLIL classroom.

Discussion 11: The language of content - Chemistry Topic (Acid rain)

(Reporting back on conferences and meetings; discussion on the language of the chemistry topic acid rain, demands on learners, strategies and techniques for dealing with this language in the CLIL classroom.)

Discussion 10: CLIL suggests an integration of subject and language - How can we get teachers collaborating?

(Reporting back on conferences and meetings; discussion on strategies and techniques for encouraging collaboration and integration in teaching and learning.)

Discussion 09: Supporting Talk in Content Subjects

(Reporting back on conferences and meetings; discussion on strategies and techniques for supporting talk in the CLIL classroom)

Discussion 08: Skills for CLIL: Reading

(Reporting back on conferences and meetings; discussion on strategies and techniques for developing reading skills in the CLIL classroom)

Discussion 07: Use of L1 in the CLIL Classroom

(Reporting back on conferences and meetings; discussion on use of the mother tongue in the CLIL classroom)

Discussion 06: Assessment in CLIL

(Reporting back on conferences and meetings; discussion on assessment and testing in CLIL)

Discussion 05: Dialogue between language and content

(Reporting back on conferences; Question forms in the classroom; CLIL teacher training)

Discussion 04: The CLIL Debate

CLIL: Complementing or Compromising English Language Teaching? 

Discussion 03: CLIL TT

What goes into a training course for content CLIL teachers?

Discussion 02: The Ideal CLIL Teacher

What is the ideal CLIL teacher? Does it exist? What are the skills a CLIL teacher needs by default?

Discussion 01: Getting started

A discussion on the ways and means of getting started in integrating the teaching of a content subject with a foreign language.

 
 

Café CLIL
Discussion_01: Getting started
Dec 19th, 2009

The recording of the discussion is available in YouTube and is the first of what we hope will be many discussions on CLIL in all its aspects.
The two colleagues who joined me for discussion are Bernd Merlock and Lauretta D'Angelo.
Introductory text from these colleagues follows as well as a contact email.



Bernd Morlock   bernd.morlock@web.de
I teach students at vocational schools (age 16 to 19) in History and political science / social studies in the southwest of Germany. We often have to cope with a highly heterogeneous group with sometimes basic deficits which do, however, show some potential if we work hard and make them work hard too. The thing is that we can hardly implement any bilingual streams but have to work with flexible modules. I also work in teacher training where I had some, but so far only little, experience with CLIL. At the moment we are very interested in getting (time-saving) access to suitable materials in modern history and social studies; right now I would be grateful for materials on voting systems (German vs British).

Lauretta D’Angelo  dangelo@irre.lombardia.it,   dangelo52@fastwebnet.it
I taught German as foreign language at upper secondary level from 1977 till 1999. Then I began to work at the Regional Institute for Educational Research in Lombardy (Italy) as researcher and teacher trainer.  In 2000 I began to approach CLIL and develop CLIL programs together with a team of other language teachers coordinated by Gisella Langé  (Inspector for language teachers). We ran together in-service training for teachers of various foreign languages both on site and on line. We developed also European projects about CLIL (Comenius and Minerva). My specific fields of research are European Dimension and European Citizenship at school and foreign language teaching/learning.  Starting from last November I am doing a doctoral research for the University of Zaragoza about the Professional profile of the CLIL subject teacher. I am still working with Gisella Langé and her team about a possible certification (a kind of label) for school that foster the CLIL  approach. I am author of many publications concerning the above mentioned  thematic areas, the most recent one is “Integrazione europea in materia di istruzione e formazione: una sfida ancora aperta” (European Integration in education and training: a still open challenge).

----------

The topics we covered in brief were:

01_Introductions - a general introduction from each colleague, their backgrounds and interests.

02_Networking - Here, we discussed the phenomenon of the vast majority of CLIL meetings being in the ELT sphere and where almost no opportunities exist (in our experience) for subject teachers teaching through the medium of English as a foreign language to get together, to share and network.

03_Malaysia - the example of Malaysia is given of a context with a national policy for foreign language-medium education, problems and solutions.

04_Finding teachers - there was some discussion about recruitment of English-medium subject teachers, the restrictions national educational systems present, examples of small initiatives of exchange between countries.

05_CLIL TT - both Bernd and Lauretta are trainers and we talked about what goes on in their training.

06_CLIL Method - We also touched on what CLIL methodology is, what it offers for both language and subject teachers.

07_Future Topics - We put together a list of possible discussion topics for future Café CLIL meetings.

- Competences for subject teachers

- Materials

- Methodology and tasks

- Testing for subject teachers

- Assessment for students

- Communication and networking for teachers

----------

There were several other colleagues interested in joining this discussion but obviously it's not always easy to coordinate a group to meet at one time, with the same medium for communication.  We used SKYPE, and I recorded the discussion.  This itself presented problems in that I wasn't able to record all three of us at the same time and this meant that I had to record myself separately from Bernd and Lauretta, and then cut and paste the two recordings together afterwards.  I've since found a software which I hope will solve this problem for future Café CLIL meetings.

----------

I suggest we make one meeting per month, and see how we get on.  For the moment, I suggest the following:

One day of Wed to Thurs 21-23 Jan (13.00 - 18.00 Bulgarian time for up to one hour)
One day of Wed to Thurs 25-27 Feb (13.00 - 18.00 Bulgarian time for up to one hour)
One day of Wed to Thurs 15-17 Apr (13.00 - 18.00 Bulgarian time for up to one hour)

I'm afraid that we'll have to be flexible about timing and dates, and I think that the best way to arrange the meetings will be based on choosing the best time for the greatest number.  Let's try it this way for the start, and if there are colleagues who feel left out, perhaps I can try and arrange a second date for a repeat discussion.
If you'd like to get involved in these discussions, just drop me a line (keithpkelly@yahoo.co.uk) with an indication of preferred date, time and topic(s) in order of preference.  Please also include a short text about your work background and interest in CLIL to be published on this site.  Please note also that all discussion will be recorded and published here after the meeting.  Skype offers a maximum conference number of 24, so there's room for more, though I'm not sure we'll practically manage so many colleagues talking at once!

Café CLIL
Discussion_02: The ideal CLIL teacher profile
Jan 22nd, 2009

You can listen to the entire recording of our discussion here at this YouTube link. 
The colleagues who joined me for discussion are Bernd Morlock, Lauretta D'Angelo and Peach Richmond.
Introductory text from colleagues new to the discussion follows here as well as a contact email.



----------
My name is Mr Peach Richmond and I live and work as an English teacher and teacher trainer in Switzerland. I have taught English at lower secondary level for 17 years and at commercial college for 10 years. I hold a masters degree in ELT from Exeter University. I am currently working 50% as the Project Manager for the introduction of English at primary schools in Canton Lucerne and 50% teaching English methodology at the Pädagogische Hochschule Zentralschweiz in Lucerne. I do not work in CLIL (yet) but CLIL will be an important part at primary and secondary levels and my special area of interest is content-based teaching and learning. (Peach.Richmond@lu.ch)

There was some discussion beforehand that we could usefully discuss what the ideal CLIL teacher is, what would a profile be for the CLIL teacher, what skills do they need, should they have?  Also, what would a training course be like which would try to offer the skills and knowledge teachers need to reach the profile being described?
Based on this suggestion, Lauretta and I prepared texts with ideas on this topic.  Lauretta sent in the document below - subject teacher competencies.  It describes what kind of training the CLIL approach should offer.  I sent in a document with the table of ideal CLIL teacher descriptors and then themes for training to meet the profile descriptors.
In actual fact, in discussion, we only dealt with the issue of language levels of teachers.  That's perfectly fine as it gives us a lot more to discuss at later dates!!!!

The topics we covered in brief were:
1 First of all you can hear a brief introduction from Peach as well as an outline of the needs as he sees it of his trainee teachers, and also the perspective of the teachers themselves.
2 There is consensus that CLIL teaching should start with the content rather than the language and that the language should come from the content.
3 There are some interesting comments about multilingualism in Switzerland and how this relates to (and if it actually influences) CLIL.
4 A lot of the discussion revolves around the issue of what the minimum level of English should be for CLIL teachers.
5 A conclusion to this discussion suggests that CLIL training should ideally be modular for the very reason that there is such a great diversity of context and teacher in the CLIL world and a modular appraoch would not only respect that, but also be more realistic given the circumstances teachers have to live and work in.  It may be that CLIL training needs a portfolio approach where teachers can collect evidence of achievement as and when they can get it during their professional lives.
6 There was some discussion about where teachers can actually get language proficiency from while working full time, living, raising families and that the best way may be living for a period in the country of the target language.
 
Suggestions for further discussion included:
- How are subject CLIL teachers (i.e., Biology, Maths) trained?
- What actually is hard CLIL, what actually is soft CLIL?
- Bring in a subject teachers' perspective.

So, if you're a subject specialist teaching students through English as a foreign language, why not join us for the next discussion.  Send me an email if interested keithpkelly@yahoo.co.uk
 
Extras:
1) There was a reference to levels of language exams and the CEF and this site compares exams and levels.
http://www.x.amega.hu/doc/letters/longman/42/new_cef_chart2.doc
2) There was a question as to whether Swiss teachers can apply for EU funding?
I did some considerable searching, but couldn't find any evidence that teachers are receiving EU funding for training.  If you know different, let us know.

I'm using a piece of software called 'Call Burner' which enables me to record the audio input of all participants into one audio file.  This is much tidier than the first attempt!

It looks like we are moving towards choosing Fri 27th at 1 or 2pm (Central European time) for our next discussion as two colleagues have already said that it's convenient.
The other times and dates are included here, do get in touch if you'd like to join us.  I claimed that we'd be flexible about time and dates, and offered to do repeat discussions, but this is proving difficult!  All I can say is that the earlier we sort out dates and times the better.
Cafe CLIL 03 - One day of Wed to Thurs 25-27 Feb (13.00 - 18.00 Bulgarian time for up to one hour)
Cafe CLIL 04 - One day of Wed to Thurs 15-17 Apr (13.00 - 18.00 Bulgarian time for up to one hour)
If you'd like to get involved in these discussions, just drop me a line (keithpkelly@yahoo.co.uk) with an indication of preferred date, time and topic(s) in order of preference.  Please also include a short text about your work background and interest in CLIL to be published on this site.  Please note also that all discussion will be recorded and published here after the meeting.  Skype offers a maximum conference number of 24, so there's room for more, though I'm not sure we'll practically manage so many colleagues talking at once!

 

Discussion 03_Content_TT
What goes into a training course for content CLIL teachers?
27.02.09

We were joined by Peach Richmond, Lauretta D'Angelo, Lida Schoen and Egbert Weisheit.  Introductory text from colleagues new to the discussion follows here as well as a contact email.

The recording of the discussion can be found at this YouTube link.



New visitors to Café CLIL:

Dr. Lida Schoen received a doctorate in (analytical) Chemistry from the University of Amsterdam in 1972. Since then she has been involved in education in chemistry and Teacher Training (Amsterdam).  In 1996 she started her own educational consultancy, with mainly governmental commissions. Examples are experimental materials for a new chemistry curriculum (A-level), e.g on spectrometry and biochemistry and for general science on the male pill. A last commission came from the Social Security to write a curriculum and teaching materials to reintegrate unemployed people by means of computer work.  Lida is co-creator with Keith Kelly of the YAC (Young Ambassadors for Chemistry) project and is an active team member and promoter of Science Across the World programme.  In 2007, Lida was made a Knight of the Order of Orange Nassau by her Majesty the Queen for her contributions to Science education in and raising public understanding of chemistry. (amschoen@xs4all.nl)

Egbert Weisheit teaches Biology and Chemistry in Kassel, Germany and is a teacher trainer offering in-service teacher development in the region. His foreign languages include English and French and he is particularly interested in communication in Science and developing cross-curricular activities in his teaching and training.  Egbert focuses his work on practical activities, experiments and outdoor work in Science.  An area Egbert specialises in is teaching Science in English.  Egbert has been a team member of Science Across the World for a number of years and is the programme's representative in Germany. (eweisheit@arcor.de) 

The topic for this discussion has grown out of a previous discussion on what the ideal CLIL teacher is.  Here we talk about the contents of training programmes for Content teachers of CLIL subjects.  The stress on content teachers is deliberate.  In preparation for discussion I put together the contents or a number of courses I know personally for CLIL teachers.  This document can be downloaded from the link below.

There is also mention of the European Portfolio for new teachers as a starting point for discussion about competences for CLIL teachers and that can be found here: http://epostl2.ecml.at/ or from the link below.

Topics discussed:
As usual we had some teething problems with the technology, but the participants got on and introduced themselves and the recording starts with Egbert talking about who he is and what he does.

- There is a summary of pre-service training for subject teachers in each of the participant country.  There is no pre-service training for CLIL.  Only in Switzerland is there any CLIL component in pre-service teacher training.  Luzerne is given as the example of Swiss pre-service CLIL training where at Primary teachers do a module on CLIL.

- Holland has no formal requirements for bilingual schools regarding content and language integration.  In Germany, schools use CLIL to promote themselves, and there is still a lack of official recognition for teachers, and a lack of CLIL teachers generally.  In Italy, language teachers are trained in post-graduate courses to prepare CLIL modules.  There is a recent law which stipulates that within two years all students will have some subject teaching through the medium of a foreign language.

- Peach suggests that the push for more collaboration between language and content teaching in secondary may actually come from primary (where it is more common) into lower secondary and then secondary and it may come from the children themselves as they progress through the years bringing their own CLIL needs with them.  Peach also explains that Luzerne CLIL has developed out of a need for new ideas for teaching language at an early age and CLIL was one of those ideas.

- We touch on what the contents of a programme of training should be for CLIL teachers, and Lauretta highlights the need in training for 'strategies' such as 'scaffolding' - what it is, and how to provide it - as key to training for CLIL teachers and also the function of questioning in the classroom, higher order questioning.  Egbert suggests that what his teachers need are more ideas for teaching communication through Science, more interactive tasks.  Egbert and Lida, both Scientists, both stress the need for developing school curriculum links to give a foundation for language and content integration in the school.  There is agreement that teachers need to develop an awareness of the language of their subjects and techniques and skills for making this language accessible to students in their classrooms.

- There is also interesting discussion about how in some contexts L1 policies are driving discussion about language across the curriculum.  In Switzerland this is the case where High German in the classroom versus Swiss German has brought about guidelines for use of language across the curriculum.  EAL (English as an Additional Language) policy in the UK is mentioned, this is a policy for language throughout the whole of the curriculum in the UK.

- We also discuss the IATEFL CLIL debate question - CLIL: Is it compromising or complementing English language teaching?  The whole group was in agreement that CLIL only compromises language teaching where the language teaching is old fashioned otherwise it can only complement it.  Lauretta states that it's a chance to reinforce the language.

 

Discussion 04: The CLIL Debate
03.04.09
CLIL: Complementing or Compromising English Language Teaching? 

You can listen to the entire recording of our discussion in this YouTube link. 



We were joined by John Clegg, Lyubov Dombeva, and Egbert Weisheit.  Introductory text from colleagues new to the discussion follows here as well as a contact email.

The topic comes directly from the debate on the same theme at IATEFL Cardiff.  You can catch up on that debate at the IATEFL Website, or the onestopclil website.  

There is an article from Lyubov Dombeva at onestopclil with a subject teacher's perspective on the debate.  There is an English teacher's perspective at the onestopenglish website.

You can also give your opinions at the discussion forum at onestopclil after the debate at the conference is over.  The debate will go on!
There is also a PPT of questions related to CLIL attached below. It is from a meeting I had with trainers in Milan and the issues may be of interest to those listening to this discussion. 

Topics discussed:

Introduction
I started out by setting the scene for the discussion.  The panel discussion in Cardiff at the IATEFL conference was the same morning of our discussion.
I said that I thought it would be interesting to hear the opinions from subject teachers about this theme as it comes from the ELT event.  I also thought it would be interesting to hear what the subject teachers thought about why the debate was going on.  Why this anxiety from the ELT world?  
Collaboration
Egbert says that in Germany there is little collaboration between the subject teachers and the language teachers and Lyubov says the same that in Bulgaria it's rare to find cross department collaboration.
John suggested that EU directives may be the source of some of the anxiety as the demand for more subjects taught through foreign languages will mean changes for language teachers.  This could be the source of the worry.
I always think that for language teachers CLIL should be an opportunity for enriching your teaching repertoire, about having more ideas for things to do in class.
Lyubov reminds us that content is actually there to stay in the language classroom and in textbooks you won't be able find a course that doesn't have chapters on some content area: environment, health, diet, etc.
Egbert points out that in Germany there is a tradition for 'pure' language teaching and there is a gap between the 'ideal' science learner and the ideal language learner, a gap built by the system which is hard to overcome.
Lyubov points out that in her experience students who are strong in language tend to be good at the science and the opposite is also true.

Training 
John states that there is a great need for more training for teachers.  There is a discussion about the role of universities and that there is still little initiative to coordinate pre- and even in-service training for teachers in Germany.  CLIL training does happen but it tends to be from individual institutions without supervising coordination from regional organizations.  Though there is a growing interest in English-medium education at University level, there is little provision for this to trickle down the system in the form of training for school teachers.
John mentioned that there is disquiet in the UK about English-medium education being shipped abroad to countries like Holland and Germany which will mean losses for UK universities.
In reality in Germany schools compromise and accept teachers who can teach their subjects through English, but who aren't certified to do so. Frankfurt University has a project for in-service training to offer certification for practising teachers.

Motivation
I wanted to make sure we get in some discussion on the motivation of learners about studying their content through the medium of English.  In my experience, students flourish and it should be said that this is so.
Lyubov says that motivation comes from both parents, and students.  Some students will never be enthusiastic, but others find it fun and generally speaking their motivation comes from the development the learning will have for their English language and the access this will give them to study abroad.
Egbert states that there is usually some initial 'irritation' from the students when they have to do their science in English, but that in fact the motivation of the students motivate him to go on and do more each year.
John concludes for us that actually it's telling that the debate about CLIL is going on in the ELT world, where the caution is on the part of the language teachers, when it's actually the subject teachers who are doing the work.  There is a need for more training for subject teachers, and more investment in CLIL for content teachers, and there is a risk that the investment in the EFL world CLIL draws away necessary funding for Content CLIL.

Extras:
Lyubov mentions a trip to the European parliament, you can find out more about it here:
Eurscola day at the EU parliament
http://www.welcomeurope.com/default.asp?id=1300&idnews=453&genre=0
 

Discussion 05_dialogue between language and content

(Reporting back on conferences; Question forms in the classroom; CLIL teacher training)

06.05.09 (17.00 central EU time)

You can listen to the entire recording of our discussion at this YouTube link.



We were joined by two new colleagues to Café CLIL. Introductory text from colleagues new to the discussion follows here as well as a contact email.

New visitors to Café CLIL:
Sabine Sauerwein is working as teacher for Biology and Religion in a secondary School in Wiesbaden / Hessen / Germany. She is working with Prof. Dr. Wodzinski in a pilot-scheme to encourage women in science and technology at the University Kassel. She is co-operation partner from the ADALOVELACE - Project (encouragement for women in sciences) at the University Mainz. She is also co-operation partner at the University Kassel CINSaT (Center for Interdisciplinary Nanostructure Science and Technology), that project is supporting young men and woman. She is a member of the MNU (mathematical – natural scientific– education) and is working with teachers as instructor. At the education authority in Wiesbaden she is Set- Coordinator and works with teachers as instructor for SiNUS Science. 
She is interested in school biology-projects by teaching pupils in English language because most of the original literature is written in English. Therefore pupils will need this during their study and later at work. She heard from the CLIL (content and language integrated learning) and is interested getting involved in that project. The globalization of markets fits to Sabines Slogan: “bring people closer together!” (sabine.sauerwein@web.de)
Cristiana Ziraldo: I am a teacher of English in a secondary school and I am a teacher trainer at university (I teach future teachers of English). I have a degree in foreign languages (English and German) and a MA of arts (University of Guelph, Canada). I have been responsible for the CLIL project in my school for more than five years (a liceo).  Before then, I was responsible for the CLIL project in the former school I used to teach at (a vocational school). My present school is “scuola polo” which means so to say head school of all other schools linked to CLIL in my province (Pordenone, which is near Udine, where you came!).  My school is the scuola polo (headquarters of CLIL in Friuli Venezia Giulia) because one of my colleagues (a teacher of English too), is the head of CLIL in our region. (clauchi@libero.it)


There were two documents uploaded prior to the discussion, both from John Clegg and both of relevance to the discussion point to do with question forms: Language for classroom management; Supportive teacher talk.

Reports on events attended
IATEFL Cardiff CLIL Panel
David Graddol while initially sceptical on CLIL, is now positive and suggests that parents need support also. Graddol stressed the need for time not dictated by a political cycle or agenda. Hugo Baetens-Beardsmore stated that 'perfect CLIL like perfect monolinguals doesn't exist'. There was agreement that the role of language teacher will change. http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org
YLST SIG fielded discussion
We got stuck on assessment and there were very few subject teachers in the discussion. The write-up of the discussion will be published on onestopclil next month. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/younglearners/ www.onestopclil.com
Tri-CLIL Barcelona
There was a significant group of subject teachers at the event and there was and is a growing focus on the subject teachers in terms of their importance in CLIL. 
CLIL across Contexts: A scaffolding framework for CLIL teacher education
This was a socrates / comenius project meeting offering a model for teacher education. Here assessment is high on the agenda (relationship between subject knowledge and language ability). The suggestions are an interaction between language and content similar ideas to those in John Clegg's documents uploaded to Cafe CLIL. Other key ideas were multimodal teaching and supporting language. The final report on definitive materials is expected in September. http://clil.uni.lu/

Discussion points
Question forms in the classroom
Lauretta gave us the idea for discussing questions initially, as she believes that how questions are used affects the way you run a lesson.  It affects newly trained teachers and how they run a lesson. Display questions are the most common, and the question is asked if CLIL is to be as interactive, communicative and inclusive do we need to change the questions we use in the classroom to give more opportunities to learners?
Christiane Dalton-Puffer 'Discourse in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) Classrooms' surveys over 500 minutes of classroom time and one of the conclusions is that display questions make up over 90% of all questions.
Peach describes his training context which stresses community language teaching, and discourages display Qs, tries to encourage more genuine, more real questions, as more real Qs  shows more interest in the pupil. We may need to operate more with concept questions rather definitions, more real questions.
Keith raises the point that there may be a need for more 'modelling' of structures through other forms than questions, or at least using questions which represent structures which occur in output language. Peach stresses here that CLIL in this very way delivers immediate reward, immediate achievement.
Lauretta then stresses that we may need to develop a more task-based approach generally, enrich the lesson with a mixture of different of activities
Sabine in her Science and Religious Studies classes gets students to carry out projects and then feedback, take the focus away from the teacher and give it to the students.
Training teachers and questions
Peach emphasizes that questions are dealt with on a purely abstract level with trainees in his courses, but that during observations he makes notes and is then able to make reference to concrete examples. In this way there is a look at question forms in practice and then reference to that back in training in theoretical sessions.
Keith suggests that one way ahead may be to produce scripts, lists of questions followed by subject-related language in the same way John Clegg lays out in his documents on classroom language (link). We may need something more detailed and expanded for specific subjects.
Lauretta stresses that the CLIL teacher is not a new type of teacher but it is one which integrates many skills and class management and questions is one of them as it is for other teachers.