DEVELOPING LEARNING TO LEARN COMPETENCE: AN EXPERIENCE WITH UNIVERSITY STUDENTS AS A CHALLENGING FORM OF COMMUNICATING IN ENGLISH AND EXPERIENCING INNOVATIVE CLASSROOM PROCEDURES

Educational trend within the Bologna process conceives autonomous students who play an active role in their learning process, which would mean somehow changing traditional teaching into a more interactive environment and therefore teachers shouldn’t really be playing the main role but students. Furthermore, students should become independent users of at least one European language other than the one/s learnt within their learning period (primary and secondary education). In this sense a dual-focused educational context has been proven beneficial, that is, teaching a foreign language integrating contents from different subjects. However teaching in most educational contexts has to be adapted to local conditions such as educational system, school and personnel resources, social acceptance, learners’ profile and needs, etc.
At Valencian Universities, a Plurilingualism Promotion Plan is intended to develop a growth of interest among teachers to integrate a foreign language (mainly English) into different university subjects. This is the case of innovative educational groups created to experience an active methodology and innovative classroom procedures.
The main aim of this work is to show how to develop “learning to learn” competence in first grade students of pre-service teacher training faculty, in order to let them experience active teaching-learning classroom procedures by means of the content subject “English language for primary teachers and its didactics”. This content subject can be either be taught on the first or the second semester, in our case data was taken during the second semester as students also sat an online placement test, which helped us establish the experience outcomes also in terms of language proficiency.
There were several goals: learn how to teach a foreign language (English) to children by self experiencing first the methodology, enable students to use English as a medium of instruction in their teaching, and learn how to design and assess their own subject content materials for a CLIL lesson.
This experience intended to show whether students were able to learn a foreign language by learning how to teach it to their future school children at the same time. Somehow we intended to prove how beneficial learning a language integrating other subject contents could be at a tertiary level.