Multilinguismo, CLIL e innovazione didattica - Libera Università di ...

An example from CLIL-Science
Excerpt 1 p resents a traditional instructional text on molecular motion. Compared
to the CLIL-activity which requires two pages and 45 minutes to complete,
this traditional text is comprised of 132 words and requires only 3
minutes to read. Yes, but probably many more minutes to understand (or
memorize?). How easy are these 132 words to digest? Unfortunately, this way
of languaging science is t he staple of science-education (Wellington and
Osborne, 2001).
Excerpt 1.
To understand the different states in which matter can exist, we need to understand
something called the Kinetic Molecular Theory of Matter. Kinetic Molecular Theory has
many parts, but we will introduce just a few here. One of the basic concepts of the
theory states that atoms and molecules possess an energy of motion that we perceive
as temperature. In other words, atoms and molecules are constantly moving, and we
measure the energy of these movements as the temperature of the substance. The
more energy a substance has, the more molecular movement there will be, and the
higher the perceived temperature will be. An important point that follows this is
that the amount of energy that atoms and molecules have (and thus the amount of
movement) influences their interaction with each other.
http://www.visionlearning.com/library/module_viewer.php?mid=120
By contrast, the task-based CLIL activity renders molecular motion not only
easily understandable, it allows learners to first acquire and then confidently
use the academic language of this scientific concept. How did it work? In Ex
1a and 1b, learners use lower-B1-level knowledge of FL-grammar to formulate
sentences and obtain information regarding experimental materials and procedures
1 . Exercise 1c then obliges learners to revisit these question-answer pairs
by rewriting them, in full, in the speech bubbles. Haptics, the process of
generating voluntary movements through proprioceptive control (Mangen
and Velay, 2010), not only obliges learners to reprocess and output the language
on another cognitive level, but increases occasions to notice how Eng-
1 A more detailed analysis of this exercise has been presented in Ting, forthcoming.
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