International CLIL Lesons Plans

The European Centre for Modern Languages is in an institution created by the Council of Europe "whose mission is to encourage excellence and innovation in language teaching and to help Europeans learn languages more efficiently."

The ECML goals are clearly stated on the website:

• focusing on the practice of the learning and teaching of languages
• promoting dialogue and exchange among those active in the field
• training multipliers
• supporting programme-related networks and research projects

To achieve these objectives the ECML organizes international projects on language education. Some of these projects are complete and many of the resources and materials derived from these projects have been placed online. They can be very inspiring and helpful to us.

The most recent 4-year project runs from 2012 to 2015. There are 15 ongoing projects and their results will be published in due time. The list of ongoing projects is extensive and very interesting. All the working teams are international and, in many cases, there are many participants from different educational institutions in Canada. I am particularly interested in three of them. I look forward to their results! They deal with some of the issues we encounter in our schools every day. Topics I have tried to discuss and reflect in this blog:

• Literacies through Content and Language Integrated Learning: effective learning across subjects and languages
• Using open resources to develop online teaching skills
• Plurilingual whole school curricula - PlurCur

One of the already completes projects is Conbat + Content Based Teaching + Plurilingual/Cultural Awareness. I think that the name of the project gives us clear information of the objectives and they are detailed on the website.  What is very interesting to have a look at? First the training kit for teachers available online. And second, the didactic units produced by teachers in several countries in three different languages, English, French and Spanish.

 

The units are mainly for junior and senior high school and cover most of the subjects areas. There are sections for the teachers to get the pedagogical needed insight and also the working sheets and handouts for the students. The fact that there are examples in three languages, produced in different countries makes them very rich and inspiring.

My suggestion is to spend some time reviewing them, even if we are not very fluent in some of the target languages. We will get some inspiration from them for sure.