“S” for Skills

In all the subjects in the schools, the children have to develop very specific skills to consider that he has reached the established level, and CLIL is not less. However, somehow, CLIL should be considered a way to develop skills that support the development of the skills required in the rest of the subjects. For example, CLIL is a way of helping students to understand vocabulary of the world of rocks, which is a topic normally connected to “Science”. Indeed we are talking about different things, but if we do not have enough time to study rock´s vocabulary deeply, we must provide to the students help in a different way.

With these first knowledge, we can say that CLIL helps students to affront there difficulties of other subjects in a second language, but we ca not do it without connecting them with those subjects. This means that the same topic must be seen in at the same time in the two subjects. If we use the example that I have suggested before, we cannot work the topic of the rocks in “Science” and then two weeks later see it in CLIL. It must be approached at the same time; otherwise it will create a lot of confusion in the children.

Of course there are a lot of points that can help the children to learn better a foreign language or other topics, but the most important is the influence of parents. “Recent researches have shown that children benefit in many different ways when their parents are interested in and involved in their education.” (Brewster and Ellis, 1991) The problem is that is not easy to work with the parents, because you have to face their beliefs and worries, and sometimes they do not want to hear the truth. That is why “teachers need to be prepared and willing to take on these additional aspects of parent care as part of their day-to-day role.” (Brewster and Ellis, 1991) How? Teachers should be available to talk to parents about their children´s progress. Before talking with them, teachers must be prepared and sure about what they want to advice or talk about. For instance, a primary teacher that sees some characteristic aspects of hyperactivity on one of his students, first he must talk to the school psychologist and confirm that the suspicions are true or false before telling it to the parents.

Apart from preparing the class very carefully, there is another task for the teacher that is a little bit complicated. In all the classes including CLIL, it is obligatory to connect different skills to get to a new goal. Something connected with all the classes and with two important skills required is “Literacy”. “Literacy” connects reading and writing skills, both of them are needed for all the subjects and in the real life. How could we use “Literacy” correctly? “The most effective way to make the connection between reading and writing is to do it whenever the opportunity arises.” (Cloud, Genesee, Hamayan, 2009) We have to lookout for the situations that we can use to connect the two tasks, read something they have written, or write about something they have read… These is the idea of connecting not only the reading and writing, also many tasks and topics.

To conclude, in all the subjects a teacher must be trained sufficiently to provide a good learning process and make sure that the development of different skills is working. Their duty is to increase those skills or abilities which the students are good at and supporting them in their problems. Besides, society should be cornered about the important role of parents in the education of the children, without them it is impossible to create an appropriate learning environment.

References:

-     BREWSTER, J. AND ELLIS, G. (1991). The Primary English Teacher´s Guide. England: Pearson Education Limited.

-       CLOUD, N., GENESEE, F. AND HAMAYAN, E. (2009). Literacy Instructions for English Language Learners. United States of America: Heinemann.