Page 59 - Teaching English at Primary Level: From Theory into the Classroom

The Elements of CLIL

Classroom Insight: Your Favourite Free Time Activity
Lina is keen on identifying topics from non- of questions to go over the results, for ex-
linguistic subjects which are good candi- ample ‘Which is the most preferred way
dates for CLIL lessons. One of such topics is of spending free time in this class?, Which
data management which is usually covered is the least preferred way?,’ etc. When this
in mathematics in the fifth grade (10-year- part is over, she discusses the different
old pupils). The subject objective is for the ways of presenting information with the
pupils to be able to analyse different kinds students, together they compare the pre-
of data and use the appropriate ways of pre- sentation of the results in a table, picto-
senting it (e.g. pictographs, pie charts, tally graph, pie chart, bar graph. They also dis-
graphs, bar graphs or line graphs). The lan- cuss why a line graph is not appropriate
guage objectives are for the pupils to be able in this case.
to take part in a survey in English, follow the 3. The pupils choose a way to present the
teacher’s instructions and presentation of dif- results and draw it. They write a short
ferent graphs, carry out their own survey and presentation of the results. The teacher
present the results in English. The activities guides them with useful chunks: ‘We car-
usually take two or three lessons. ried out a survey on ...,’ ‘The results show
that ...,’ ‘As we can see, the favourite way
First Lesson
is ...’
1. In the first lesson, the teacher carries out
a survey at class level. The main survey Second/Third Lesson
question is ‘What’s your favourite way Pupils carry out a project in groups of four:
of spending free time?’ She presents the 1. they decide on a survey question (e.g.
pupils with a list of activities (watching their preferred outdoor/indoor activity,
TV, doing sports, reading books, playing their preferred activity when hanging out
computer games, playing board games, with friends, the preferred way of spend-
etc.) scaffolded by pictures on the board ing their winter holidays, etc.),
in theformofatable. 2. carry out the survey in class,
2. The students close their eyes and raise 3. analyse the data and decide how to
their hand when they hear their favourite present the results,
activity. She records their votes in the ta- 4. write a report and present the results
ble on the board. Then she uses a series in class.

nition, communication and culture (Figure 3.1). Coyle et al. (2010) emphasize
that a successful CLIL lesson should combine the integrated elements of all
4Cs. The principal aim is to integrate content learning (content and cogni-
tion) and language learning (communication and culture). The 4Cs frame-
work reflects the interrelationship between content (progression in knowl-
edge, skills), communication (interaction, language used to learn), cognition
(thinking and understanding) and culture (awareness of self and the others).

Content (through the FL)
Content refers to progression in knowledge, skills and understanding of a se-
lected subject area. For example, from the mathematics topic ‘time,’ the aim

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