Abstract:

The Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) initiative has experienced a considerable growth and is being integrated into curricula all across Europe (Lasagabaster, et al, 2010). Although this teaching approach has been mainly practiced in basic educational levels, it is currently being displaced to Universities. The implementation of the EHEA and the increasing need to attract students from third countries have speed the processes of language policies implementation in many of the Spanish Higher Education institutions.
This study stands at the University of Almería (Spain), a Spanish monolingual province where in 2009, a Plurilingualism Promotion Plan was approved to enhance the teaching of courses from different disciplines in a foreign language.

A group of 62 students (49 women [79.3%] and 13 men [20.9%]) out of 87 (70 women [80.6%] and 17 men [19.4%]) enrolled in the subject Psychometrics in the 2011/2012 academic year and participated in the experience. Their ages ranged from 20 to 37 with an average age of 22.69 and a standard deviation of 2.8.

Following our prior experiences (López, 2011; Salaberri, Sánchez and López, 2012), we offered students the possibility to make a short film in English in order to get extra marks. The short film should be based on a comment appeared in Nature magazine on March 22nd (Bardin, 2012). They were encouraged to use the material provided and the contents they had assimilated in the subject to develop the short.

Students suggested the professor to create virtual forums in WebCT platform in order to self organize the task. As a result, eight forums (general, direction, script writers, following-up, filming, acting, edition and technical) were created to allow students to self-organize the short creation. Additionally, they self-distributed in each team work and made up roles to accomplish the task. The day the short was presented publicly, the following-up team work provided the professor with an assessment report of the development of the task. They created their own assessment system and they graded the rest of their mates by the use of three dimensions (attendance, participation and objectives achievement) and providing specific information about individual performances.

Students taking part in this experience achieved the course objectives using a second language. The most important observation was that students developed their own organization structure and their own assessment system. Additionally, our experience is an example of the usefulness of multimodal resources to facilitate the parallel acquisition of content and language in the university setting.

References:
Bardin, J. (2012, 22 March) “Making connections”, Nature, 483, 394-396. doi: 10.1038/483394a
Lasagabaster, D. and Y. Ruiz de Zarobe (Ed.) (2010). CLIL in Spain. Implementation, Results and Teacher Training. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Newcastle.
López, J. (2011). Experiences encouraging creativity and team work in a content and language integrated learning framework at university. In I. Candel, L. Gómez, & A. López, ICERI2011 Proceedings CD (pp. 5543-5551). Valencia: International Association of Technology, Education and Development.
Salaberri, S., Sánchez, M. M., & López, J. (2012). CLIL experiences in higher education: an innovative practice in the psychology classroom. Oral communication presented in the II International Round Table on CLIL Programs. Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona.

Keywords:

Content and Language Integrated Learning, university, self-assessment, filming.