Mini whiteboards and CLIL

Last week I gave a workshop at the national CLIL conference on mini whiteboards. Mini whiteboards are a great addition to the CLIL toolbox. When they’re used in a classroom, each learner has one so when the teacher asks, for example, a question, every learner is expected to give an answer (by holding their whiteboard up).

As well as getting the workshop participants to experience specific activities that use the whiteboards, and that can be applied to every subject, as part of the workshop I also tried to identify the elements of CLIL underpinning these activities. I came up with ten. Here they are, with some indication of the rationale behind each element.

1. WARMING UP

Warmers are important in a CLIL lesson to help learners make the transition from a regular lesson to a CLIL lesson, or from one subject to another. There are lots of ways that mini whiteboards can be used for quick and easy-to-setup warming up activities.

2. ENGAGE EVERYONE

Using mini whiteboards, everyone is engaged and everyone is expected to come up with a response or answer to a task. When learners show their boards, the focus is on the answer and not on the individual learner.

3. PROMOTE INTERACTION

Mini whiteboards can be used to guide a discussion and to encourage learners to interact with each other. Interaction is important in order to get learners to use and experiment with language – getting learners to speak English is one of the big challenges in a CLIL classroom.

4. ACTIVATE PRIOR KNOWLEDGE

Mini whiteboards allow the teacher to see everyone’s answers, giving feedback on what the learners already know, and then allowing the teacher to choose which responses they want to focus on in order to connect to the content of the lesson. Building on prior knowledge is an important factor for both learning a language and for learning specific subject content.

5. INCLUDE LANGUAGE AIMS

Mini whiteboards help the teacher to include some form of written output in a lesson and also to activate spoken output. Subject teachers have to become language teachers in a CLIL context – this is one of their biggest challenges!

6. GIVE WAIT TIME

Mini whiteboards can be used to give “wait time” to learners. This is important in a CLIL context in order for learners to think about and to process language and content.

7. PROVIDE LANGUAGE REHEARSAL

Mini whiteboards can be used to provide learners with language rehearsal. For example, by firstly writing down an answer the learner is able to think about on their own the language they need to use. Next, they can practise using this language with a partner. Only after this do they then get to give an answer in front of the entire class. This takes the pressure off the learner in terms of being able to supply an immediate answer verbally. Second language acquisition theory shows that learners learn a language best when their anxiety levels are lowest.

8. ACTIVATE HOTS

Giving learners open and stimulating questions to think about and discuss can also help to develop their language skills. Also, once learners have provided answers by showing their whiteboards, questions to learners at this stage about their answers on their boards can be used to further stimulate HOTS (higher order thinking skills).

9. USE (FREQUENTLY) FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT METHODS

Formative assessment is important in a CLIL context because assessment for learning is a key issue for CLIL teachers since they are always working with both language and content, and they need to use regular formative assessment methods to check on the learning of their students. Mini whiteboards are an effective means for doing this because the teacher is able to see very quickly if there are any problems.

10. REFLECTION

Whiteboards can also be used as a great way for reflection at the end of a lesson. For example, get learners to write down on their boards what was the most important thing they learnt in the lesson. This can help to consolidate their learning and also enables the teacher to check what learning has taken place. This is important for CLIL teachers because of the dual focus on content and language, and which therefore makes for a twofold demand on the learner.

CLIL Is Yours - fifth national CLIL conference

Yesterday was the national CLIL conference organized by the European Platform. Here are some thoughts on what I took away from it.

Firstly, for me one of the main themes that emerged from the conference is the need for subject (content) teachers to recognize that they also become language teachers when they work in a CLIL context. This was something that was very apparent in both the keynote talks. As Peeter Mehisto put it, a geography teacher, for example, needs to shift their self-identity so that they can describe themselves as a geography and language teacher and not merely a geography teacher.

What also emerged from the two keynotes is the importance of an understanding in a CLIL context of what Keith Kelly referred to as General Academic Language. I’m sure that developments in this area will feed into the design of textbooks over the next few years as we see the publication of more books aimed at a specific CLIL market. These books will try to make both the language of the subject and the academic language explicit to the learner. The kind of scaffolding strategies for this will be adapted from EFL and ESOL teaching methods – for example, the use of word banks, sentence starters, substitution tables, writing and speaking frames and so on. In the meantime, subject teachers will need to augment their existing textbooks with these types of scaffolding activities by designing them themselves (so they might get ideas for this by looking at the course books that their colleagues teaching English use).

A third aspect to the conference was the incredible diversity of CLIL concerns and issues – from all the hands-on workshops with practical ideas for CLIL activities to workshops looking at ways to embed international and intercultural content, from the various subject specific workshops to workshops that focus on CLIL skills across subjects. This range of concerns is what makes CLIL so fascinating.

CLIL Inspirers: Ted Wragg

CLIL could be described as an eclectic methodology that draws on a range of educational theory and practice.

There are therefore many CLIL inspirers. The late Ted Wragg has been one such inspiration for us, especially his work on the importance of effective questioning and getting learners to think. One reason this is important in a CLIL context is because second language acquisition theory shows that learning a language requires input that is meaningful to learners – so getting learners to think and then to talk or write about problems that they find interesting and thought provoking is also important for their language learning.

In this film Ted discusses the importance of effective and stimulating questions for learners in a classroom.

Bilingual vmbo

Facts about tvmbo and book "Proud to be tvmbo"
In October 2011 the book “Proud to be tvmbo” was published by the Centre for Teaching and Learning (ex-IVLOS) at Utrecht University, written by Rosie Tanner and Rick de Graaff. It is the result of a short research project of 200 hours into good practice in tvmbo. The book is written in accessible language for teachers and management working in or planning to work in tvmbo (or bilingual pre-vocational secondary schools).

 

I am writing a few blog entries about parts of the book which I think are interesting for our readers. This blog is a “did you know...?” one!

 

Did you know…

• there is a network for vmbo schools which have already started bilingual vmbo? If you are interested, contact Leo van Putten ,the chair of the network. His email address is: L.vanPutten@annavanrijn.nl
•  there are 5 schools that started tvmbo in 2010?
•  there are 31 schools in the tvmbo network already?
• there are 14 schools that have already started tvmbo?
• there is a quality standard for tvmbo schools?
• tvmbo schools must give a minimum of 30% of their classes in English?
• for tvmbo GL/TL, students have to achieve a level of B1 on the Common European Framework of Reference (commonly known as the CEFR) in either reading OR listening, and in either speaking or writing?
• at least two subjects in the curriculum must be in English?
• teachers teaching in tvmbo have to have a level on the CEFR of at least B2?

 Tanner, R. & de Graaff, R. 2011. Proud to be tvmbo: Teachers’ and students’ opinions about good practice in bilingual secondary vocational education (tweetalig vmbo). Centre for Teaching and Learning, Utrecht University. ISBN 978-90-393-5566-4

MTV = Maximum Time Verbals

One of the biggest challenges facing teachers in the TTO is how to get their learners to speak English in their lessons. One approach could be for a teacher to focus on reducing the amount of time they speak in front of the class in order to shift the focus onto the learners’ spoken output.

So, for this reason I've been encouraging teachers to use the MTV rule. MTV stands for Maximum Time Verbals, meaning the maximum time a teacher talks for a given moment in a lesson (not the maximum time for the whole lesson). This amount should not exceed the average length of a music video on MTV (the television channel) – 3 minutes.

The idea then is to plan instructions, explanations, etc. that will be given to the whole class in order to ensure that each time these can fit into three minutes. After that the learners will then do an activity, such as a speaking task. Imagine then that all the spoken output in a lesson (teacher and learners) could be transcribed, producing a ‘script’ of the lesson. This then would be the spoken ‘content’ of a lesson. What would the ratio be between teacher’s spoken contribution and the learners’? How about aiming for a 20/80 ratio? That means 80% of the lesson’s spoken content is produced by the learners.

Teaching the concept of connotation

It might be interesting to use this image in a lesson to discuss the connotations of particular words (always a difficult topic to convey to second language learners). Click on the image for a larger view.

EIO and outdoor activities

What is and what is not EIO (European and international orientation)? This question was raised at a discussion at the network meeting last Thursday for bilingual vmbo (tvmbo) schools. Does an activity week in the UK where children do outdoor activities “count” as EIO? No-one seemed to know the answer and the general opinion seemed to be that it wasn’t really EIO. I disagreed!

On Friday I went to a conference organized by the European Platform, ‘Met talen kom je verder’ and gave another workshop about tvmbo. Luckily, the expert on EIO from the European Platform was there, so I asked him: ‘Is an outdoor activity week in the UK EIO? Can it count?’ ‘Of course it’s EIO!’ he said. Schools are obliged to have a project or projects in their curriculum where students actually work together in English in their EIO programme. By doing this, they fulfill one of the demands of the EP’s quality standard for TTO. But a 24-hour visit to Dover, or Canterbury, or a week’s outdoor activity is a good addition to a whole EIO programme.

Problem solved!!