Archive for the ‘CLIL’ Category

A huge change in the way English is being taught in Oregon, apparently:

“Schools have begun explicitly teaching the grammar, rules and structure of English. And they are doing it in a carefully ordered way, making sure that students don’t miss any of the building blocks of how English verbs are conjugated, words are ordered, conversations are expected to proceed and sentences are constructed.

‘For a long time, we just read to them and exposed them to English and figured they would pick it up just like native speakers do,’ said Danelle Heikkila, who directs the English Language Learner program for Gresham-Barlow schools.

‘But the state has asked us to . . . make sure that we teach them about English, about the rules and forms and structures of English.’”

So the revolution is: teachers teach rather than “letting students discover themselves through the language” or some such 

And the results? (more…)