THE USE OF ICT TOOLS FOR INSTRUCTION IN HIGHER EDUCATION CLIL LESSONS: AN INNOVATIVE PRACTICE IN A CHEMISTRY LAB

In the recent years, we have witnessed a considerable increase of pogrammes and projects related to plurilingual education. Many of these programmes are already present in different educational areas in both compulsory and non-compulsory levels. However, this trend it is currently being displaced to Higher Education levels. This trend is motivated on the one hand, by the new demands of the current knowledge-based society, and on the other, to the creation of a European Higher Education Area (EHEA)

These plurilingual programmes have been implemented through different approaches. One of the most widespread is the Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) initiative. This term was coined in 1994 at the University of Jyväskyla (Finland) and the European Platform for Dutch education (Fortanet-Gómez and Ruiz-Garrido 2009; Marsh 2006) and has been defined as “a dual-focused educational approach in which an additional language is used for the learning and teaching of both content and language with the objective of promoting both content mastery and language to pre-defined levels” (Maljers et al, 2010).

The number of English-taught programmes at tertiary level has tripled since 2002. However, they still stand far beyond the studies conducted in earlier educational stages, and further empirical research still needs to be developed in order to have a reliable overview on the results of its implementation at universities.
The present study stands at the University of Almería, where a pioneer Plurilingualism Promotion Plan is being developed in order to integrate foreign languages (mainly English) into different university courses. It is focused on a Chemistry course taught in English in which the lecturers used different multimodal resources related to ICT tools to complement their teaching in English for instruction purposes. The resulting instruction materials consisted of some videos in English (with English subtitles) recorded by the lecturers of the course explaining the proceedings for the practice at the laboratory.

Results show that the development of these resources for Chemistry laboratory practices amply enabled the achievement of the course objectives. It unexpectedly increased the students’ participation and motivation towards the course. These results the usefulness of these multimodal resources to support the teaching of both Chemistry methods to be used in the laboratory as well as foreign language.