CLIL is no longer a punishment
This is a story I’ve been following for a while but didn’t get around to writing about until it was finished- Catholics in Valencia have tried to sabotage a new civics course that seemed too liberal for them (what wouldn’t be??) by forcing teachers to teach it in English. Sounds like a fabulously dastardly scheme that would have made even Franco proud, until you realise that teaching other subjects through English is not supposed to be a way of making a subject impossible to teach but rather the next big thing in TEFL, namely CLIL, the bandwagon that Macmillan has recently jumped on with a hugely expensive looking site here.
I must say that I’ve always had my doubts about CLIL. The theory is that you can teach a school subject and English (or other foreign languages) at the same time. Two for the price of one, sounds too good to be true! Well, if it sounds too good to be true…
Tags: News
December 18th, 2008 at 11:10 am
One person who seems to really be hitting the TESOL conference circuit is David Marsh. Some of his stuff here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianweekly/story/0,12674,1464367,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2007/mar/16/tefl1
December 19th, 2008 at 9:24 am
This farce down in Valencia wasn’t even an attempt at CLIL, but as you mentioned a simple attack on the moderate central government by a bunch of fundamentalist Catholic right-wing loons.
In the classroom they actually had “simultaneous translation” going on, as the students’ level was no where near up to the task. You can see it in action here.
What are they protesting? As you also mentioned, a simple civics course that tries to teach teens such nasty things as tolerance and alternative family structures.
If education here in Spain wasn’t poor enough…