If you were not limited by the demands of the national/regional curriculum, what would you say is the most important thing you would teach your students about you subject (in a CLIL context)? How would you assess their learning?

I work as a psychologist in a Secondary School and I'm sure that the curriculum is not our limiting factor for teaching in a CLIL context. Especially when I am teaching students from 12 to 16 years. I'm not sure about this at higher levels because 18 years old's students must pass an admission test to college and this test is about content.

The curriculum only reflects content (What do you teach?) but CLIL is the style or method that we use (How do you teach?).

So what would I say is the most important thing I would teach my students about my subject? I don't teach any subject. I usually provide my students with information about careers, degrees, academic options, vocational options....I teach them study skills.

From my point of view, the most important thing is that my students learn how to make a decision about their future, be autonomous, learn to learn, dialogue and have a critical or abstract thinking.

I teach them how to behave when they go to an interview and work communication skills. For this reason, I hope that my students have competence in linguistic communication. I teach them to design their portfolio, CV, for these activities use digital media. I want my student acquires digital competences.

I want that my students develop social skills and citizenship competence because it helps them to develop intercultural skills and facilitates mobility.

Sometimes, my students have sit and work together. It helps them to learn how to do constructive critiques involving them in critical reflection, to helping their classmates to make a decision, to design a CV, etc

For some activities I include role-playings and oral presentation. I am using rubrics for the final task and the self assessment before, during and at the end of the process.

It's important that students assess the knowledge of themselves and peer assessment help them to strive for a more advanced and deeper understanding of the subject matter, skills and processes.

In my case it's not necessary to be objective and reliable in the assessment.

 

TAKING INTO ACCOUNT MY PERSONAL TEACHING CONTEXT, WHAT WOULD BE THE ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF USING THE ELP WITH MY GROUPS

First of all I want to introduce what is the ELP. The European Language Portfolio is a personal document of a learner. In this document learners from all ages can record their language learning and cultural experiences at school or outside school.

I work as a psychologist in a High School. Taking into account my personal teaching context, I would like to talk about the advantages and disadvantages of using the ELP within my groups.

On the one hand, the advantages to use ELP in classroom is that learners take over ownership of their learning process. It promotes a wide range of competences such as:

- Competence in linguistic communication because of ELP shows the level of language.

- Digital competence because of my students are over 14 years old and they can create their digital portfolio. It allows different access to different artifacts. They can modify the contents of the digital portfolio to meet specific goals.

- Learning to learn competence, the dialog and the abstract thinking. When they design a ELP they are aware of their learning processes and needs. They identify available opportunities and develop the ability to over come obstacles in order to learn succesfully.

It has an influence on student motivation in classroom learning activities.

ELP also develop social skills and citizenship competence because it helps to develop intercultural skills and facilitates mobility.

On the other hand, the disadvantages to use ELP is that teachers don't know it. Besides teachers think that they don't have enough time to work  within ELP in the classroom. It's very hard. Children with special needs such as children with attention deficit will have difficulties doing ELP because only have writing information, no visual information.

Another drawback to use a e-ELP is that is not accessible to everyone because no everyone has an e-mail account.

Taking everything into account, spend time learning to create a ELP has more advantages than disadvantages. The ELP facilitates education and vocational mobility and encourages lifelong learning of languages. It contributes to the promotion of democratic citizenship in Europe.