Abstract:

Educational trend nowadays, within the Plurilingualism Plan, is intended to develop a growth of interest among in- service teachers to integrate a foreign language (mainly English) into different school subjects. Currently most schools and teachers devote their compulsory ongoing training at schools in formative sessions, fostering the achievement of the basic skills to embrace the principles of an integrated methodology. This is the case of innovative educational groups created to experience an active methodology and innovative classroom procedures. Furthermore, a dual-focused educational context has been proven beneficial and as a consequence, teaching in most educational contexts has to be adapted to local school conditions.

The main aim of this work is to show how a brief but well planned introductory course on CLIL methodology can provide with the basic underlying principles to be gradually introduced in regular class sessions.

There were several steps in the course plan:
a) Course plan description to in-service teachers to provide with an overview of what they were supposed to infer;
b) organize collaborative work using English as a medium of instruction in their teaching, (in-service teachers teaching in different primary and under-five cycles);
c) overcome difficulties in teacher’s perception of the active methodology versus traditional teaching, as they showed certain reluctant attitude to teach in English due to several reasons: lack of knowledge of English language, lack on fluency and lack of self confidence;
d) learn how to design and assess their own subject content materials for a CLIL lesson by self experiencing first the methodology,

This experience intended to show whether in-service teachers were able to learn a foreign language by learning how to design collaboratively their own teaching materials in English. Somehow we intended to prove how beneficial learning a language integrating other subject contents and teachers could be when all teaching cycles gather under a same teaching goal.

Keywords:

In-service teacher formative sessions, CLIL, course planning.