Benefits of CLIL

   Benefits of CLIL

Калдыгулова  Умит Болатовна

Подстепный қазақ жалпы орта білім беретін мектебі

Ағылшын тілі пән мұғалімі ,педагог-сарапшы

       I want to share with my experience   as ELT teacher when I first started   to learn CLIL. At the beginning I didn’t   attach importance to it. After a short while I realized the substance of the CLIL. It became interesting to me that language and content are taught together, methods and skills  differs  from ELT lessons.

      What is CLIL for me? CLIL is another sphere of development in which I can take more fun and experience from guiding other subject  teachers. In our school subject teachers are eager to know more about the  language structures  as they are interested in learning and teaching it. When they have misunderstanding in certain concepts   you’ll think thoroughly before  giving them advise  in preparing lesson plan or conducting a lesson.

      There is a creative association which is called “Language Link” in our school. In this association   6 members are subject teachers;(2 teachers of biology, teacher of physics and 2 ICT teachers) and 2 ELT teachers. We both have certificate of TKT CLIL Band 3.I am guider of this association. Every Saturday we gather to discuss and share with experiences and   which they come across while teaching CLIL. As they are subject teachers, well-experienced in their subject but they may have difficulties in teaching  lesson in the target language. They haven’t got involved completely in CLIL. They only teach optional course   once a week that’s   why can’t delve into the teaching CLIL at once. In our case all these subject teacher are over 45 and   I can’t say that they have a perfect memory in remembering theory in target language. Practice comes for years through teaching and learning.

       As I’ve mentioned before we have creative association in our school. We are working according to the curriculum that we created at the beginning of the school year. In this   plan we considered activities that will be held during the whole year. I would like to emphasize one event which we held with the CLIL trainer Matzhanova Gulvira Zhusupovna. Now she is vice-principal of the West Kazakhstan Engineering Technology University. She is one of the best, smart and well-experienced trainer . We conducted a seminar with our subject teachers on theme: “adapting materials”. At first she initiated with the theory and various ways of adapting materials. After that she delivered different tasks and activities to be able to adapt these materials themselves. We choose   this theme because they  have a challenge to work with authentic materials and to my mind it was a good experience for them. They had opportunities to adapt materials according to related items. They tried  to adapt these  materials taking into consideration level, age, removing unnecessary details, paraphrasing language, reducing lengths of sentences. Moreover they share with their experiences in using materials in their lessons. According to their words they usually work with worksheets and it is easier to download but they use such kind of authentic materials   rarely. In future they will use   varied   in form tasks and activities.