General teaching challenges that we may face and possible solutions.
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To make yourself understood: It is hard for teachers to make themselves understood when they have 25-30 different students, which learn in a different way. For this reason when explaining a concept it is good to think about different ways to explain it, from different perspectives; Moreover, asking students all the time if they have understood what you were explaining.
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To link the content with the students real context: another challenge for teachers is linking the content with the context, because students need to know which is the aim of what they learn, how they could apply in a real life situation the content they are learning.
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To be creative: It is also difficult to be creative/innovative depending on school were you are teaching, depending on the group of students you have and depending on how much time you have been teaching. For this reason, you cannot give up! You have always to be thinking about new projects, new ideas. A good teacher always needs fresh air to be a super teacher.
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Adapting class activities to the levels of all students: The activities that the teacher plan have to be adapted to the students needs. Depending on which type of students are in the classroom, the teacher has to prepare different type of activities to take into account all students.
Specific challenges of applying a CLIL methodology
What should we take into consideration in a CLIL lesson? Which type of activities should we include? In which ones do we make our students use English? Which scaffolding resources do we provide? How do we assess?
In a CLIL lesson we should take into consideration:
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To equalise language and content teaching.
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To create rich activities which help students to assimilate the content.
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To create rich scaffolding to help students.
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To try to use always english as the main language.
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What do we have to take into account when preparing the activities?
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Students english level
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What do we want our students to learn?
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Which type of activities we are going to prepare? ( A reading, a writing, grammar, vocabulary, video, game… etc.)
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How we’ll know if our students understand the content? ( Make students explain to the rest, summarize the main content, asking questions randomly to students… etc).
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Timing (How much time we have to dedicate to a specific activity?)
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Which type of scaffolding do we need?
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Does the topic takes into account students interests?
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How we are going to assess the activities?
Type of scaffolding used in a CLIL class:
1. Repetitions
2. Rephrasing / reformulating
3. Manipulatives (games, real examples of what
you are explaining)​
4. Illustrations / pictures
5. Videos
6. Internet
7. Charts
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Scaffolding is used in order to help students understand what they are learning. It is very important to guide our students during their learning, but in CLIL lesson it’s even more important as they are not learning in their mother tongue. They have to have as inputs as necessary.
Regarding assessment, it has to take into account the evolution of students. Therefore, continuous assessment; the CLIL teacher has to take into account the student effort, their work, interest, and the improvement the student is doing in the language and in the content.
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