Proud to be tvmbo - Kortlopend Onderwijsonderzoek

• Pay attention to language which is specific to your subject.
• Include lots of speaking at the start of a tvmbo programme.
• Encourage students to use English outside the classroom.
Assessment: work on, use a variety of assessment types
• Discuss ways of assessing tvmbo students in your team, both for content and language.
• Use a variety of ways of assessment.
Recommendations for in-service training
• Find out what the level of your teachers is when they join the team, in all English
language skills
• Organize English lessons for them in school as a team and send them to the UK on
courses.
• Send teachers on in-service courses related to CLIL skills. It is important to work
on English language skills first, and CLIL skills later.
• Encourage teachers to become aware of language of their subject.
• Encourage teachers to learn about and use scaffolding (see glossary).
• Organize moments for collaboration between English and subject teachers.
• Teach teachers how to stimulate interaction in the classroom.
Recommendations for further research
• A deeper and broader literature search would be useful.
• The online survey could be re-opened to target a larger number of teachers and
students.
• A further analysis of the surveys and interviews could be carried out.
• A study could be carried out to examine carefully the language which students
need in bilingual vmbo.
• A further study could be carried out in order to examine carefully the language
which tvmbo students require in order to reach vocational literacy or vocational
language proficiency.
• We could look at the differences between Dutch and English language achievement.
• A study could be carried out to look at language development in Dutch and English.
• We might examine how schools can implement an effective language policy for
bilingual vmbo, both in terms of English and Dutch.
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