II International Congress on Bilingual Education – Call for Papers
The University Rey Juan Carlos (Madrid) in collaboration with the Madrid region Department of Education is announcing the celebration of the II International Congress on Bilingual Education from 20th to 22th October. The call for papers and the registration is now open. More information here.
XXV GRETA ANNUAL CONFERENCE – Call for papers
The English Teachers Association of Andalusia is announcing the celebration of their XXV Annual Conference, entitled “Listen to your heart, speak your mind”, and to be celebrated at the Facultad de Ciencias de la Educación, University of Granada from 8th to 10th September,2011. Among their main topics, they will deal with Bilingual and Plurilingual Projects.
If you wish to attend this event, you should know that university students have a reduced fee. Please check more details here
First-aid session
On 10th May we’ll hold a session to know how to give basic emergency medical treatment. The session will be conducted by Alicia Sanz, a bilingual expert who has been trained to provide assistance in case of emergency situations.
The session will last from 16 until 19 hours, and will take place at the Escuela Universitaria Cardenal Cisneros. Registration is now open for teachers and students of any educational institution. For more information please click here.
A bilingual literacy experience at tertiary education
You can know read an article about a literacy project developed last yeat at the Escuela Universitaria Cardenal Cisneros. The abstract is the following:
The following article is focused on the study of a literacy experience I developed in a teacher training college in Spain (Escuela Universitaria Cardenal Cisneros). A group of students taking an optional subject on English language and literature took part on three activities which aimed at promoting a more aesthetic reading (Rosenblatt, 2005), and increasing their awareness of the importance of enjoying reading and writing books. The activities were the creation of a Spell Book, a newsstand and a bookcrossing experience.
It is available here
New book on Content and Language Integrated Learning
Much has been written about bilingual education, but there is still much to say about multilingual contexts… One example of this is this book, which has just been published (January 2011). This volume has been edited by Yolanda Ruiz Zarobe, Juan Manuel Sierra and Francisco Gallardo del Puerto, and contains interesting contributions on the multilingual educational context. It can be accessed here or using Google Books
Xavier Gisbert visits our University
Foto: Elena Boto (Diarío de Alcalá)
On 16th March, Xavier Gisbert, Director General for Quality Improvement in Teaching of the Department of Education of the Madrid Regional Government, visited our University. We invited him because we considered it important to provide our students with first-hand information about the organisation of the bilingual project in our region, and about the selection process of the teachers involved. The talk was informative and arose some key questions that need to be addressed from the point of view of teacher training. How can we ensure that teachers have good methodological training? How can we help them get this type of training with so very little time in their timetables? How can universities help future teachers get the appropriate training to work in a bilingual school? Etc. You can see part of his talk here
During his visit, we also had the chance to explain Mr. Gisbert the organisation of our bilingual project, and how we are offering bilingual degrees which help students not only improved their English level, but also acquire knowledge from subject areas and experience a way of teaching/learning they can transfer to the schools. His opinion about it was positive, and it was later reflected in the following newspaper article: here.
Yes, we can teach! Our future bilingual teachers
Foto: Iván Espínola (Diario de Alcalá)
A local newspaper, Diario de Alcalá, was interested in our bilingual degrees, and this is the result of the interviews carried out with a group of students and with the coordinator of the project (it happens to be me… 
). We started small, and we are making the first steps towards implementing a full bilingual project at the Escuela, but the first outcomes are really interesting (have a look at our students’ opinions!). Let’s keep on working on helping these students become good bilingual teachers!
Musical English Workshop
On 8th
March, Harriet Thompson, well-known teacher trainer, will be in charge of an interactive workshop on how to use songs to teach English both in EFL (or ELF) and bilingual contexts. People interested can register at the reception desk of the Escuela Universitaria Cardenal Cisneros. More information can be found at: www.cardenalcisneros.es
CLIL-ing in me softly. Defining CLIL.
It is interesting how specialists all over the world are trying to define CLIL. The first definition was written by the European Commission and tried to consider it as an “umbrella term”. In 2002 David Marsh provided the (probably) most quoted description:
CLIL refers to situations where subjects, or parts of subjects, are taught through a foreign language with dual-focused aims, namely the learning of content, and the simultaneous learning of a foreign language.
Little by little the “umbrella” seems to be described more accurately, as teachers become more familiar with CLIL in practice. In other words, practice is shaping the concept of CLIL , and it is helping to determine what can be considered CLIL and what it is not, by any means, teaching through a foreign language.
An example of this is the distinction between soft and hard CLIL I’ve come across thanks to the work of Keith Kelly and Phil Ball. Soft CLIL stands for teaching content through the medium of a foreign language but with predominantly linguistic objectives. Teachers involved in soft CLIL will put language issues in front of their syllabus, and use content to give a framework for them. In my opinion, this is a more EFL version of CLIL, as most EFL teaching in the last decades has been topic-based but language oriented. Different methodological techniques may apply, though.
On the other hand, hard CLIL stands for teaching content through the medium of foreign language with content objectives at the front. That is, language is relevant as much as it is needed to progress in the learning of content, but THERE IS, and MUST BE, language awareness, more specifically at the level of discourse and functional language.
After seven years working on researching and studying bilingual education, I am more inclined to consider the definition of hard CLIL much closer to my idea of what integrating content and language is. If we really want to use any foreign language as a communicative tool in the classroom, content cannot be enslaved to language. Quite the contrary, the real integration appears when we are able to determine which language we need to help our students to access that content, to work with it, analyse it, assimilate it, and create with it. That’s my view.
Further reading on the definition of CLIL What is CLIL? by Phil Ball (onestopenglish)
CLIL Pyramid by Oliver Meyer
You can now download the article “Towards quality CLIL: Succesful planning and teaching strategies” by prof. Oliver Meyer. Click here
