Summary of the Project
Summary of the Project
Our project aims at developing an innovative methodological tool to teach CLIL classes.
The tool will
be developed to serve the purpose of producing CLIL teaching material and a relative teaching
methodology, which will support it. The project is based on a CLIL teaching paradigm, designed by
the coordinating school, the Greek school, which has been awarded the European Language Label
2016. In our project language is viewed as one of the semiotic systems that interlocutors have at their
disposal to communicate. It is also viewed as a social product, developed in different contexts, which
serves a specific social purpose and exists to provide interlocutors with the means of meaningful and
purposeful communication.The project's starting point is introducing CLIL as a methodology to teach
EFL classes and uses English as the language of instruction and as a working language. Yet, its very
essence is a suggestion about organizing any CLIL class, regardless of which the language of
instruction will be. Our model can support any CLIL class and can be easily used by subject teachers
and language teachers alike. Our core content will be Astronomy - we will produce multi-modal
teaching material to teach elementary Astronomy to students of lower secondary schools, aged 13 to
15, with a linguistic level of competence from A1 to B1+. Yet, Astronomy will not be our only content.
The project has a cross-curricular character, meaning that we will seek affiliations with other school
subjects, such as Geography, Biology, Arts, History, and this content will be integrated with the core
content in an interdisciplinary way. Moreover, we will add a cultural component to the core content:
Mythology. Mythology, Astronomy's cultural alter ego, will be our platform for an intercultural dialogue
and a way to reduce cultural misunderstandings and tension among participants, teachers and
students. Five (05) European lower secondary schools will cooperate to produce and develop an
innovative CLIL class. Subject teachers will work along with language teachers to develop the
teaching material and to carry out teaching CLIL sessions in a cross-curricular, multi-modal,
interdisciplinary and intercultural way. Participating teachers will get involved in a short-term joint
teacher-training workshop, a 'mentoring' training event, during which more experienced teachers in
CLIL and its affiliations will pass their knowledege and experience to less experienced ones, thus coconstructing a commonly-shared platform of teaching the project.There will also be student exchange
events where both students and teachers will have the chance to attend and organize 'inter-CLIL
classes', sharing and integrating material, activities, content and language.Another very important
aspect of this project is that it is actually an action research project, meaning that the teachers
involved will investigate their own teaching practices, which will be reflected on and revisited
throughout the project, aiming at drawing research conclusions from raw classroom practice to be
presented at the end of the project and to be used in future CLIL classes.The project is expected to
improve learners' linguistic and cognitive skills and will serve as a model for any CLIL class to be
developed in any educational environment. The theoretical model is easily adapted to educational
needs and a learner's linguistic level of competence and is rooted to a viable view of content and
language teaching. Teachers are expected to develop professionally both because they will be
producers and designers of their own teaching material and because they will be researchers of their own work.