Prof.sa Erika Amatulli - La Redazione
As anticipated by Antonio and Dmytro, in their introduction, the specific Methodology applied during some of the lessons planned and implemented when Cristina, Caterina and Susanna joined the class 5BOD is identified by an interesting acronym: CLIL, Content and Language integrated Learning.
Personally, I discovered this methodology in 2016, when I was a Primary School Teacher. Acknowledging its benefits on the students’ FL/content-learning intercultural awareness and attitudes, in 2018, I decided to analyse its specific features, writing a Master Thesis in Applied Linguistics (University College Dublin).
Furthermore, in 2020, for the first time, I had the opportunity to apply this methodology in three different classes of an Upper Secondary School in Milan (Liceo Carlo Tenca), attending and completing a Specialization Course in CLIL Methodology promoted by Letizia Cinganotto (INDIRE) and Daniela Cuccurullo (TESOL Italy).
CLIL identifies a “dual focused educational approach in which an additional language is used for the learning and teaching of content and language with the objective of promoting both content and language mastery to predefined levels” (Marsh et al., 2010). The term was coined by D. Marsh and A. Maljers in 1994, adopted by UNICOM, the University of Jyväskylä (Finland) and the European Platform for Dutch Education in 1996. Many Italian Schools of first and second cycles have implemented pioneer CLIL projects since then, mainly based on the 4C’s-model elaborated by Coyle (2007).
Furthermore, in line with the language policy promoted by the European Commission, the Upper Secondary School Reform Law that entered into force in 2010 (Law no. 53/2003) made such projects compulsory (Cinganotto, 2016). In particular, the D.P.R. 88/2010 and the D.P.R. 89/2010 set CLIL as compulsory in the last three years of “Licei Linguistici” and in the last year of all “Licei” and “Istituti Tecnici”. The impact of the Upper Secondary School Reform Law (2010) on the Italian teachers’ pedagogical practices and the willingness to incorporate Coyle’s 4Cs-model in my personal pedagogical practices, justified, from the very beginning, the need to investigate its main components: Content, Culture, Cognition and Communication.
Content
The Content of a CLIL lesson is variable and depends on many contextual factors such as educational policies, levels of education, school curricula, presence of specialized teachers and types of target audiences. As I have already said, CLIL can be used to teach particular aspects of a curricular subject, to create interdisciplinary projects involving separate subjects on specific topics, to carry out cross-curricular studies entailing the syncretic combination of some aspects of different subjects and, finally, to maintain a focus on global citizenship. In every case, authentic materials have to be adapted to diverse learning styles, guaranteeing the comprehensibility of the target language and favouring cross-cultural/cross-linguistic comparisons.
Culture/Intercultural Awareness
This notion implies the ability to reflect on one’s own culture using a vehicular language, to adopt adequate registers and interact with people having different cultural affiliations (like our ERASMUS students, Cristina, Caterina and Susanna), finally, to analyse the outcomes of these social interactions. In my opinion, acknowledging the changeable traits of the interrelated components of Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) as well as the endless nature of their acquisition process must not prevent CLIL teachers from carrying out meaningful and useful semiotic activities in their class.
Cognition
Coyle, Hood and Marsh (2010) propose the integration of a cognitive-interactionist perspective with a sociocultural perspective on FL acquisition. Interactionism and connectionism on the one hand and Socio-cultural explanations of interaction on the other hand can provide the theoretical framework to design and analyse effective CLIL tasks. The relationship between the level of cognitive demand and the level of linguistic demand required by every task must always guide the planning of all CLIL activities. While tasks characterized by a low cognitive and linguistic demand allow students to overcome their initial hesitation, tasks implying a low cognitive demand and a high linguistic demand are often used to focus the learners’ attention on technical vocabulary or problematic morpho-syntactic structures required by the specific content of the lesson. The shift from a teaching context requiring a low linguistic demand and a high cognitive demand to a teaching context entailing a high linguistic and cognitive demand is obtained by gradually increasing the levels of language difficulty. In conclusion, every CLIL teacher has the responsibility to guide the process of concept-building, providing an adequate language support.
Communication
Considering CLIL-contexts, it is always possible to detect three functions of the foreign language adopted as medium of instruction: language “of” learning, language “for” learning and language “through” learning (Coyle, 2007). The first function regards the functional need to adopt the specific language required by the subject matter. The second function concerns the functional need of language at an operational level in order to effectively accomplish different tasks. The third function deals with the functional need to support the cognitive process involved in every content-language learning activity. By implying higher-order thinking skills such as analysis, synthesis, problem solving, the ability to strategically reassemble the emerging language and make connections among concepts, the latter function turns out to be useful in every tasks.
Trying to experiment an innovative methodology also in our Class 5BOD (“Istituto Professionale, Indirizzo Odontotecnico”), last year, Prof. Venturino (Materials Science) allowed me to plan and implement one CLIL lesson focused on ICT (ECDL Computer Essentials), considered as a short introduction to our CAD-CAM didactic unit. It was a challenging experience, especially for the students who, after some hesitation, tried to interact and study the content of the lesson. For this reason and in order to promote the adoption of our FL in 5BOD, we decided to repeat this experience also this year, focusing the learners’ attention on Dental Resins (classification, dental uses and properties). I really hope that even our ERASMUS students, Cristina, Caterina and Susanna, will remember this useful and interesting lesson.
The need to implement the 4Cs in order to develop language and intercultural awareness to the same extent should inspire the design of every CLIL activity. If the social dimension of this awareness implies the perception on the nexus language-culture in relation to the students’ social environment, its psychological dimension entails the perception of this link in relation to specific identies and lives. The suggestion to promote a linguistically and culturally responsive pedagogy (Skinner & O’Toole, 2018) becomes even more relevant by considering that for most of our students, not only 5BOD students, “the language of schooling represents an -additional language-, -a language which they do not master, but need to cope with in order to become proficient content subject learners (Wolff, 2012)”. In my opinion, the theoretical model elaborated by Coyle, adopting an inclusive approach and widening definition of CLIL, might therefore be regarded as a catalyst for change, by determining the transformation of every CLIL and non-CLIL teachers’ pedagogical practices.
Prof. Erika Amatulli (Special Ed. Teacher, 5BOD)