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The pilot CLIL ITT module

Page history last edited by Kathy Wicksteed 15 years, 6 months ago

Katie Lee has kindly sent this report about the TDA's new Secondary Language Exchange Programme.

 

Report on pilot CLIL initial teacher training module

 

 

I was asked by the University of Reading to become part of the team providing support and training for the group of twelve Initial Teacher Trainees, who had opted to take part in the Secondary Language Exchange Programme.  This two-year TDA-funded pilot mirrors the primary programme, where trainees complete a teaching placement in a French school.  The first year of the pilot ended in July 2008.

 

The twelve students came from across the discipline range and teaching content was drawn from qualifications in Media Studies/English, History, Geography, Maths and ICT.  About half the students had majored in Languages for their degree.  The others were selected on the basis of a minimum level of competence in their chosen language medium.

 

Throughout the year, the group received language training where needed as part of their university programme.  My role was to provide a condensed CLIL method module in twelve sessions between October and February, the start of the main placement.  I decided to split the twelve sessions into theory and practice.  I based much of the theory input on work by Do Coyle and was lucky to be able to draw on video footage and my own reflections from my experiences at Hockerill Anglo-European College and Waingels College.  We covered issues around understanding the learner, such as FL2 acquisition models and their implications for CLIL.  We also looked at what the CLIL classroom can learn from the Languages classroom, with particular emphasis on full immersion style language teaching.  We then looked at ways in which learning activities can be adapted and designed.  I created a lesson planning proforma and prompt sheet for the trainees to use.

 

The trainees were then split up into content-language pairs and went away to plan a lesson of their choice through the medium of French to a small class of volunteer Year 9 students from the top set French at Waingels.  These students were used to an immersion languages classroom.  Each of these lessons was taught by the trainee pair, with the rest of the group observing.  Athough this was potentially quite a stressful situation, the atmosphere was informal and the learners had been fully informed of the context.  At the end of the lesson, we held a short feedback session, where learners, teachers and observers could ask each other questions on their experience during the lesson.  This proved to be very enlightening and this ongoing evaluation helped the pairs improve on each others’ performance each week.

 

A final selection process and the offer of placements from our partner institution the IUFM in Paris, confirmed the eight trainees who were to take part in the 4 week placement in a Paris school.  They were placed in schools in pairs and were allocated a number of classes ranging from the equivalent of Year 7 to A-level.  The students were placed in schools with existing bilingual sections in their subject specialism and therefore taught the majority of their lessons in English.  Some pupils also observed and taught their subject in the mainstream non-bilingual French section of their subject.  Subject taught included the Geography of the USA and the History of the Suffragettes.  Students taught an average of 7-8 lessons per week and were also involved in observations of CLIL lessons in other subjects.  The students carried out self evaluations and were formally observed during the placement following the same guidelines as the main ITT course.     

 

At an earlier stage in the year, a similar group of French trainees had spent their placement in Reading, teaching in schools.  I was involved in carrying out assessment observations of these students in their placement schools.  I saw a selection of lessons, ranging from one to a French class through the medium of French on the French Revolution to one in English on examining small objects under a microscope.

 

Towards the end of the Paris placement, I was lucky enough to be asked to go to Paris to observe my own CLIL students in their French schools.  They had learnt much about the French school system and the spectrum of CLIL in French schools.   It was very rewarding to see them so evidently using the theory we had covered and getting excited about the potential CLIL developments in their new jobs.  They have all got jobs locally and most of the schools are open to some kind of CLIL project.  I look forward to supporting them in the months to come and to seeing the next cohort of Reading CLIL trainees benefit from this year’s experiences.

 

As part of the visit to Paris, I was also able to take part in a consultation and evaluation exercise with the other nine Higher Education Institutions that had participated in the pilot.  As well as sharing how we had got on and hearing from some trainees, we also did some intensive ground work on adapting for secondary use the already excellent Common Reference Framework, which is currently used by the primary trainees and mentors.  This document will provide much-needed common guidance on training standards for both the French and English mentors in placement schools and I await the draft publication with anticipation.

 

Katie Lee, August 2008

 

 

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