Mariela Collado on active CLIL classrooms

Mariela began this practical workshop by pointing out a central paradox of CLIL, namely that while teaching the language skill requires lots of active productive practice on the part of the student, teaching the content requires more receptive concentration. So the CLIL teacher is pulled in two opposing directions. In this talk, she proposed to demonstrate how these could be reconciled with productive yet content-rich classroom activities.

The remainder of the workshop was a demonstration of familiar ELT tasks like song chanting, dictogloss, games and mini-dramas/role-plays, but made content rich (for instance, with a focuses on geography and life sciences).

Mariela herself is a language teacher rather than a content teacher, which may explain why she has an English-only policy in her classes. Some other CLIL talks I attended at the GRETA conference in Granada made a point of how code-switching fluently between Spanish and English could be a positive feature in CLIL classrooms.