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

Luisella Leonzini
4.2 Lesson planning: Levers.
As an example of how the physics teacher planned and developed her lessons,
I will firstly provide the framework of a lesson unit on levers, and document
what she designed to do and how she proceeded throughout the different
phases. Secondly, I will examine and analyse the pedagogical implications of
her methodological approach to highlight the strengths of a CLIL approach to
learning physics in English.
The different unit phases, in terms of what was done in each phase, what
learning activities and learning tasks were suggested, is summarized in Table
1, here below.
Phases Content Activities 3 Learning tasks 4
Starting phase Revision
the concept of
equilibrium of rigid
bodies during the
processes of translation
and rotation
1. Answering questions
(open questions 5 )
2.Summarizing
previous content
Being able to
interact and answer
the questions in
order to show both
content and language
competence
and start a new
learning step
Introductory
phase
Topic introduction
simple machine
warm up
(doing an experiment
on simple machines)
1.reflecting and
guessing simple
machines mechanism
3 In language teaching and learning contexts activities are exercises which focus on learning language
and are elaborated to lead learners to acquire forms. In the CLIL context, activities are meaningfocussed.
In order to perform them, learners experience their knowledge of the content, and language
use is incidental. While doing CLIL activities fluency and content relevance prevail over accuracy and
form.
4 Tasks are pedagogical constructs which lead learners to focus and reflect on the meaning and
function/s of their learning process. In this paper the term ‘learning task’ will be used to refer to what
learners are consciously able to do by reflecting on what they previously learnt.
5 Pica (1994) introduced the definition of closed and open questions referring respectively to convergent
and divergent questions as Wilen’s taxonomy (1991) named them. Convergent/close questions,
prompt limited answer/s, which do not demand critical reflection. Conversely, divergent/open questions
demand a higher level of thinking (i.e. interpreting enquiring, evaluating, making inferences,
summarising).
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