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

Responsibilities and competences of the CLIL teacher
information, materials, and tools which contributed to developing my analysis
and answering my initial research questions.
3.1 The schools
Since 2000, with the ministerial project Progetto Lingue 2000, up to most recent
educational reforms which introduced the teaching of a subject in English as
compulsory in the fifth year of secondary school in Italy, many primary,
junior secondary, and secondary schools, have grown interest and taken part
in CLIL projects. Both secondary schools, which I chose as the educational
environment of my research, had been both experiencing the CLIL approach
for about a decade. Content teachers (physics, mathematics, history, geography,
and philosophy) and language teachers (English) had been asked, and
some of them agreed, to be trained as CLIL teachers. If the liceo scientifico
invested a lot on the training of the subject teacher, conversely, the liceo
linguistico involved equally the subject teacher in charge of teaching physics
in English, and the language teacher, teaching philosophy. Being one of the
language teachers at the liceo linguistico I was asked and agreed to teach
philosophy in English for a year in 2007-2008. I would personally define the
CLIL journey as a challenge, a stimulating didactic and educational process,
which gives remarkably good results provided that both teachers and learners
collaborate and build cooperatively the teaching/learning process. The first
step to design a successful pathway is teachers’ primary task: they should
scaffold learning thus providing their students with both theoretical and
practical support and enable them to understand new content/s and develop
cognitive and linguistic skills.
3.2 The teachers
Both physics teachers who agreed to be the participants of my research,
although they never met, they both gladly declared to be strongly motivated
and satisfied with what they had learnt and taught with and through CLIL
projects. They had also sadly confessed they had felt alone and were still
living moments of solitude, and wished they could experience collaboration
and negotiation. The teacher from the liceo scientifico denounced lack of cooperation
with her colleagues who had decided to build their own CLIL path.
145