CLIL threads and trends in the solar-system Labyrinth

Our project has aimed at developing an innovative methodological tool to teach CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) classes. The project has been based on a CLIL teaching paradigm, designed by the coordinating school, the Greek school, which has been awarded the European Language Label 2016. In our project language has been viewed as one of the semiotic systems that interlocutors have at their disposal to communicate. It has also been viewed as a social product, developed in different contexts, which serves a specific social purpose and exists to provide interlocutors with the means of meaningful and purposeful communication. The project’s starting point has been introducing CLIL as a methodology to teach EFL classes and has used English as the language of instruction and as a working language. Yet, its very essence is a suggestion about organizing any CLIL class, regardless of which the language of instruction will be. Our model can support any CLIL class and can be easily used by subject teachers and language teachers alike. Our core content has been Astronomy – we have produced multi-modal teaching material to teach elementary Astronomy to students of lower secondary schools, aged 13 to 15, with a linguistic level of competence from A1 to B1+. Yet, Astronomy has not been our only content.The project has had a cross-curricular character, meaning that we have sought affiliations with other school subjects, such as Geography, Biology, Arts, History, and this content has been integrated with the core content in an interdisciplinary way. Moreover, we have added a cultural component to the core content: Mythology. Mythology, Astronomy’s cultural alter ego, has been our platform for an intercultural dialogue and a way to reduce cultural misunderstandings and tension among participants, teachers and students. Five (05) European lower secondary schools have cooperated to produce and develop an innovative CLIL class paradigm. In most cases, throughout the project, subject teachers have worked work along with language teachers to develop the teaching material and to carry out teaching CLIL sessions in a cross-curricular, multi-modal, interdisciplinary and intercultural way. In the cases, where subject teachers were not directly involved in the development and design of the content, language teachers used a variety of online sources to collect content information and develop it into a CLIL lesson or they technically consulted subject teachers on particular content matters. Participating teachers got involved in a short-term joint staff training event, which took place at the coordinating school premises in November 2018. The event was actually a 'mentoring' workshop, during which the project teachers from the coordinating school inducted their project partners to the principles of the suggested CLIL model of the project and invited them to share experience, knowledge and ideas on their idea of a CLIL class.That workshop also introduced the “creative writing “ component of the project, which was meant to become a vital element of the project’s development. Subject and language teachers shared CLIL-teaching ideas and passed their knowledge and experience to less experienced ones, thus co-constructing a commonly-shared platform of teaching the project. The short-term student exchange events gave both students and teachers the chance to attend and organize ‘inter-CLIL classes’, sharing and integrating material, activities, content and language. The teaching material, which was developed for real classroom use throughout the lifespan of the project and during the exchange events, was shared and taught among the participating schools, thus involving large numbers of students, and introduced two (02) new teaching components, creative writing and mediation, along with the image reading and vocabulary development, which the core methodological framework of the project already included. Another very important aspect of this project has been that it has actually worked as an action research project, meaning that the teachers involved have investigated their own teaching practices, which have been reflected on and revisited throughout the project, aiming at drawing research conclusions from raw classroom practice to be presented at the end of the project and to be used in future CLIL classes. Thus, teachers have been given the chance to develop professionally, both because they designed and produced their own teaching material and because they investigated their own work. Moreover, the project seems to have improved and boosted learners’ linguistic and cognitive skills as well as their confidence in using language to communicate scientific content, that is, students have felt more secure with the "language of schooling”. The theoretical model is easily adapted to different educational needs and a learner’s linguistic level of competence and is rooted to a viable view of content and language teaching.