European CLIL community gathers in Leiden
Recently, ICLON welcomed some 75 colleagues from 15 European countries for a meeting on Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) in research and practice. During this week, the focus was on learning, exchanging ideas and developing new tools.
Large-scale collaboration
ICLON hosted two events on behalf of the CLIL Network for Languages in Education (CLIL NetLE). CLIL NetLE is an international network of researchers and teachers working together to explore the fields of bi- and multilingual disciplinary literacies and CLIL, across 37 countries in and beyond Europe. The events in Leiden marked the halfway point of the four-year ‘action’, funded by the EU’s COST Association (European Cooperation for Science and Technology). COST Actions are large, international networks of researchers and innovators, which receive funding to conduct collaborative, interdisciplinary explorations that further a particular field.
The first of the Leiden events involved two days of working meetings, in which 35 delegates from 12 different countries took stock of the network’s work in the two years since its inception, and looked ahead to the second half of the four-year funding period. New projects were designed and alliances formed, hopefully indicating that Phase 2 of the action will be as fruitful as Phase 1.
From theory to practice
The second part of the week focused on teaching practice and professional development, with the first CLIL NetLE Teacher Training School. This event brought together over 50 local and international teachers and teacher educators. Following an introduction to CLIL NetLE by Ana Llinares of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, and to disciplinary literacies by Tarja Nikula from the University of Jyväskylä, delegates explored the concept of Cognitive Discourse Functions (CDFs) and their implications for teaching subject content through an additional language.
During a visit to Wolfert Bilingual, one of the Netherlands’ largest and longest-standing Dutch-English bilingual schools, the participants had ample opportunity to apply their learning in practice. By the end of the week, the delegates and trainers had produced a wealth of tools for teaching and professional development.
New perspectives
The Training School concluded with an ‘inspiration session’ by ICLON’s Fred Janssen and Tessa Mearns. They explored the relationship between disciplinary literacies – the ways in which we think and communicate in a subject area – and the perspective-based approach. ICLON also launched an English-language version of the ‘Perspective’ cards already well-known among ICLON’s Dutch followers. The conclusion? Perhaps these two concepts really are two sides of the same coin. For more on this, see Tessa Mearns' post on the ICLON Research blog.