CLIL Skills is a practical resource book for subject teachers working in bilingual schools. It supports them in their everyday practice and informs them about key CLIL issues. Good CLIL teaching interweaves content and language. This book covers six important CLIL Skills: activating, providing lesson input, guiding and understanding, encouraging speaking and writing, assessing and giving feedback, and using projects. This book is essential reading for CLIL teachers everywhere.CLIL Skills includes:• Over 70 practical lesson ideas• Case studies from schools• Examples and illustrations from teachers• Useful, clearly explained theory• A glossary of handy terms• Activities for teacher development.
MULTIFILE
Background to the problem Dutch society demonstrates a development which is apparent in many societies in the 21st century; it is becoming ethnically heterogeneous. This means that children who are secondlanguage speakers of Dutch are learning English, a core curriculum subject, through the medium of the Dutch language. Research questions What are the consequences of this for the individual learner and the class situation?Is a bi-lingual background a help or a hindrance when acquiring further language competences. Does the home situation facilitate or impede the learner? Additionally, how should the TEFL professional respond to this situation in terms of methodology, use of the Dutch language, subject matter and assessment? Method of approach A group of ethnic minority students at Fontys University of Professional Education was interviewed. The interviews were subjected to qualitative analysis. To ensure triangulation lecturers involved in teaching English at F.U.P.E. were asked to fill in a questionnaire on their teaching approach to Dutch second language English learners. Thier response was quantitatively and qualitatively analysed. Findings and conclusions The students encountered surprisingly few problems. Their bi-lingualism and home situation were not a constraint in their English language development. TEFL professionals should bear the heterogeneous classroom in mind when developing courses and lesson material. The introduction to English at primary school level and the assessment of DL2 learners require further research.
The current study investigated how individual differences among children affect the added value of social robots for teaching second language (L2) vocabulary to young children. Specifically, we investigated the moderating role of three individual child characteristics deemed relevant for language learning: first language (L1) vocabulary knowledge, phonological memory, and selective attention. We expected children low in these abilities to particularly benefit from being assisted by a robot in a vocabulary training. An L2 English vocabulary training intervention consisting of seven sessions was administered to 193 monolingual Dutch five-year-old children over a three- to four-week period. Children were randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions: 1) a tablet only, 2) a tablet and a robot that used deictic (pointing) gestures (the no-iconic-gestures condition), or 3) a tablet and a robot that used both deictic and iconic gestures (i.e., gestures depicting the target word; the iconic-gestures condition). There also was a control condition in which children did not receive a vocabulary training, but played dancing games with the robot. L2 word knowledge was measured directly after the training and two to four weeks later. In these post-tests, children in the experimental conditions outperformed children in the control condition on word knowledge, but there were no differences between the three experimental conditions. Several moderation effects were found. The robot's presence particularly benefited children with larger L1 vocabularies or poorer phonological memory, while children with smaller L1 vocabularies or better phonological memory performed better in the tablet-only condition. Children with larger L1 vocabularies and better phonological memory performed better in the no-iconic-gestures condition than in the iconic-gestures condition, while children with better selective attention performed better in the iconic-gestures condition than the no-iconic-gestures condition. Together, the results showed that the effects of the robot and its gestures differ across children, which should be taken into account when designing and evaluating robot-assisted L2 teaching interventions.
