On the Road with Gary in… Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Romania

Well, I got back from summer holidays and immediately jumped back in the saddle…er, seat belt again with three trips before the start of the 2011/12 school year: to Serbia for a weekend with Cambridge residential summer school in Kovacica outside Belgrade; for a four-city tour around Bosnia–Herzegovina; and for the Fischer International conference in Bucharest. I was giving lots of different talks, including a new talk on Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL)which is the subject of this post.

Gary with Serbia English Language Teachers Association (ELTA) vice-president Danijela Serafijanovic

The title of my talk—CLIL Won’t Kill —alludes of course to the Quentin Tarantino films Kill Bill Parts 1 and II.  Now, although Tarantino is my son’s favourite film director, I personally am not a big fan of his: a wonderful stylist, yes, but I don’t find a lot of feeling or emotion (except violence) in his movies.

Anyway, I changed the sword to a nice bouquet of flowers that language teachers can offer to both subject teacher colleagues and to their own language students when involved in what I call either ‘real’ CLIL, i.e. teaching a subject and a foreign language together (as is happening in a lot of countries), or CLIL ‘lite’ which for me means the language teacher bringing topics and activities from other subjects in the school curriculum, e.g. geography, maths, science, history et al, into the language classroom.

Since my audiences were language teachers, we first looked at how language teachers can help their colleagues teaching a subject in a foreign language to, if you will, ‘ride a bicycle built for two’ (That very nice analogy for ‘real’ CLIL comes from a teacher in Novi Said, Serbia, who agreed to let me use it.): choosing and adapting materials, helping with assessment and techniques such as eliciting vocabulary and scaffolding language. We looked at practical examples from the forthcoming (in spring 2012) CLIL Activities in the Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers series.

CLIL: Activities with CD-ROM (forthcoming 2012)

For CLIL ‘lite’…Well, you know that all of your students are not going to be future English teachers (although let’s hope some of them will!) and may not be interested in languages.  But they might be interested in math or geography etc.  As an English teacher you of course are not supposed to know a lot about those other subjects. But if you bring into the language lessons some matter and materials from other subjects in the school curriculum, then those non- verbal/linguistic learners can sit up and shine—even in English class.

Good for individual motivation and also for class dynamics seems to me. We looked at examples of how this is achieved in Kid’s Box for Young Learners, More! for tween-agers and English in Mind for teenagers as well as supplementary activities from various Cambridge Copy Collection titles and, of course, extensive reading opportunities in both Cambridge Fact Books for Young Learners and ‘Fact Books’ strand of the Cambridge Discovery Readers series for tween- and teen- agers. Plus secondary school students, who are already thinking about their future university studies and professions, can well profit from a dictionary such as the Cambridge School Dictionary that offers them curriculum words in other subjects for, say, report writing and presentations or just for simple information and interest.

CLIL won’t kill—au contraire! Don’t you agree?

Gary Anderson, Cambridge ELT International Teacher Trainer

PS CLIL: Content and Language Integrated Learning by Do Coyle, Philip Hood and David Marsh gives a comprehensive look at the subject. And you’ll find some interesting ideas in The TKT Course: CLIL Module by Kat Bentley—even in you’re not taking the Cambridge ESOL Teaching Knowledge Test.

On the Road with Gary in… Kazakhstan and Romania

On the road – indeed…

Thought that for this post rather than a pedagogical subject, I would tell you a little about my life on the road, using tours last month in Kazakhstan and Romania as examples.   

Let’s start in Kazakhstan where I arrived in the capital Astana around midnight and noticed the temperature sign outside the airport read…-30°! Up the next morning at 6.00 to travel by train for two talks in Karaganda and back that evening by train for talks the next day broadcast from the state-of-the-art film studio at the Ministry of Education to teachers in 120 primary schools and 460 secondary schools in linked-up teachers’ rooms around the vast country on Primary Colours for kids in primary, Messages for tween-agers in lower secondary and English in Mind for teenagers in upper secondary, as all three courses have recently been put on the approved list of courses for Kazak state schools. Have you seen the Tim Burton film version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in which Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka often says (in his inimitable manner) ‘That’s weird!’? Well, it was somewhat weird—but an interesting experience! — talking to and training teachers I couldn’t see; my first time doing that.   

 Then off that evening by overnight sleeper train to Pavlodar (got down to -40° there, but with the sun shining!) where I gave four presentations during the day before taking another overnight sleeper train the same evening back to Astana for a final two presentations there the next day. I was talking about entre autres Cambridge ELT ‘Tools for Teaching IELTS’ as IELTS is growing in Kazakhstan with Kazak students aiming for 6.5/7.0 band scores in mainly the Academic Module to study in the UK, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and in English-medium schools in their homeland. Anyway, nice picnics with delicious Kazak meat pies on the train with colleagues from Study Inn, our Cambridge partners in Kazakhstan, who accompanied me and organised the whole tour. But there was a big, gregarious Kazak man in my compartment on the first train who stored like a bear and I barely slept at all. Anyway, no snorers on the train back.   

A week back home in Paris and then off to Romania for a weekend Cambridge Day with 320 teachers in Bucharest organised by our local bookseller Centrul de Carte Straina Sitka with the ‘two Cambridges’: Cambridge ELT and Cambridge ESOL. Cambridge exams are now accepted in Romania as the English requirement for the state secondary school-leaving baccalaureate exam and I was talking about the wide range of Cambridge ELT preparation materials for mainly CAE (Romanian students have an excellent level of English!); ‘Cambridge books for Cambridge exams.’   

Gary after his tour of the Balkans, August 2009

   

But I also did a two-day tour with Centrul de Carte Straina Sitka before the big Cambridge Day, giving two talks each day in a prestigious colegiul national (national high school) in the main cities (Braila, Galati, Craiova and Slatina) of four different counties on ‘technology2teach — and learn!’ on autonomous learning and ICT with face2face which is on the Romanian Ministry of Education list of approved courses for secondary schools. Let’s see: we left Bucharest by van at 6.30 each morning and arrived back at around 10 p.m. each night.   

But, hey, I’m not complaining; I like my job! Just, as in one of The Who’s first hits ‘My Generation’: Hope I die before I get old. In any case, hope this post has given you a taste of my life on the road — but will return to pedagogical subjects in future posts.   

Look forward to meeting some of you at events in my Upcoming Travels…on the road.   

Gary Anderson, Cambridge ELT International Teacher Trainer    

PS. The picture next to this post doesn’t come from either Kazakhstan or Romania, but from the end of a tour last summer in Bosnia — where I’m returning at the end of this month: nice country; loooong roads…