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

Luisella Leonzini
As effective co-operation fosters professional development and contributes to
improving learners’ achievements (Mehisto, Marsh, Frigols, 2008), planning a
CLIL course as a solo work will never give the same results as being a member
of a te am-work. Team-working allows teachers to increase lessons planning,
share teaching activities and strategies, create or adapt materials,
elaborate assessing grids and tests, thus making the teaching and learning
process meaningfully organized and efficiently goal-oriented. Although both
physics teachers intended to find colleagues from other institutions to share
their ideas with, they both proudly asserted that they had experimented and
had been experimenting the new methodology with purposeful dynamism
and success.
In the last decade, the European Commission’s action plans have provided
funds to implement life-long learning and schools have been given substantial
monetary support to train subject teachers and increase their FL skills, as well
as invest in the creation of new materials for CLIL environments. Neither of
the two subject teachers had benefited from these funds. They had selffinanced
their teaching and language training and participation to CLIL
conferences; they attended language courses and both passed the FCE exam
and reached a solid B2 level in the fours skills, thus proving to have a good
proficiency of English as a FL.
A crucial point in the teaching experience of CLIL teachers is the re-definition
of their role in the new educational context. As lifelong learners, who would
promptly challenge their institutional role of the givers of knowledge, both
teachers felt invested with the responsibility of researching, exploring and
investigating in what ways they could give stability to the learning environment
(i.e by giving equal importance to language and content, building
learners’ confidence to experiment language and content, increasing students
language awareness) plan task-based lessons (i.e. give clear directions and
tasks, and set initial, middle and final steps), and activate learners’ interests
(i.e. by using authentic materials and visuals, doing experiments, connecting
the learning process to students’ lives, developing peer-work and collaboration,
asking learners to set content, language, and learning goals). Although
they were both using the FL as the main vehicle of communication, when
necessary, they explained some tricky points or translated some specialist
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