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

Responsibilities and competences of the CLIL teacher
By analysing the activities learners performed throughout the lessons on levers,
type 3 prevailed over the other two types. Type 3 activities led students reflect
and use the English language in context. If type 1 activities were suggested to
introduce the new subject, to provide a theoretical framework, with a focus on
the English language as a code to activate communication, type 3 ac tivities
followed the initial step of content immersion through the FL, and involved
learners into a process of solving problems thoughtfully. They had to provide
evidence (i.e. making concept maps) of what had been acquired by following
the principles of content relevance and coherence (content-oriented), and
language fluency and accuracy (language-oriented). Type 2 activities, which
were concentrated mainly in the starting phase and in the active/closing phases,
aimed at testing the acquisition of previous and new content.
Turning to the crucial issue of CLIL as a task-based process, by examining the
activities which learners were demanded to activate in the different phases,
they had been provided to exercise and develop action-tasks and reflectiontasks;
while the former aimed at highlighting learners’ ability of doing (i.e.
summarising, interacting, guessing, taking notes, selecting), the latter were
meant to reflect and point at what and how something should be done, and
how precious the teacher’s input could be to activate learners’ meaningful and
targeted output (i.e. paying attention). The analysis of what learning tasks
activities had triggered, enabled me to acknowledge the importance of the
teacher’s role in CLIL scenarios. As a resourceful and attentive guide, the
physics teacher provided learners with the tools to implement both their
written and their oral production on the unit subject.
In order to provide an answer to the second research question, I will concentrate
on the central phase and the active phase 7 of the lesson planning on levers. The
data (transcripts and logbook) revealed that the subject (levers definition, levers
classification, mechanical advantage of levers) had been presented in English
under the teacher’s guidance and monitoring, and that the students promptly
replied to the teacher’s input with active participation, interaction and production.
Both the teacher and the learners contextualised the use of the English language.
Moreover, the use of multimodal images (picture and text in English) as a verbal-
7 The two phases are presented in full in Appendix 1, together with the introductory phase. The
illustrations were taken from the Internet, the texts were adapted from British physics coursebooks.
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