Classroom language: Class instructions

When teaching through English to non-native English speaker students, it may be useful to know the most common instructions you will have to use in the classroom and make your students acquainted with all of them. It is importat to use the right instructions and not literal or direct translation from Spanish, as these may not mean exactly the same, or not be so polite, so it may leads to misunderstandings.And, remember that one of the Cs of CLIL is Culture, so, as teachers, we must be careful that the language we use is in accordance with the language culture.

As an example, in a CLIL lesson, we should avoid the expression "shut up", as for a Brit this is a very impolite wat to refer to someone. Istead, we should use "settle down", "be quiet".

In the same line, instead of saying: "open the window (imperative)", a CLIL teacher should say: "could you please open the window? (kind question)"

If you happen to come up with any other instruction I have not included here, please do not hesistate to tell me, so as, I can create new poster useful for every one.

Classroom language: Teachers' work and how to engage and assess students

Following with my previous posts on classroom language, I leave you here some expressions to use to talk about different actions teachers carry out in a school, as well as the different types of activities (mandatory, complementry, extension...) and asssessment (teacher, self, peer...) a teacher may make use of. Hope they are useful to you.

Classroom language: School staff.

To carry on with my first post on class language: https://bit.ly/2KcfUmX, here you have another useful piece of information if you are interested in knowing which is the right name  to refer to each member of the school staff. For some of them, different names are given in US and UK, so I decide to give you both names , and now is up to you to decide which one you prefer to use. 

If you happen to find any error or yo know other ways to name the same member of staff, please make me know. You can add a comment below this post. Thanks in advance.

Classroom language: Students' behaviour and absentism

When teaching in English, knowing the right words to refer to something in Shakespeare's language is indispensable. So, I have decided to begin a series of blog entries dealing with this.

Here I leave you some useful expressions related to students' behaviour, that deal with how to call the different strategies teachers have at hand to correct or improvetheir students conduct:
 - give a warning
 - take disciplinary action
 - confiscate a mobile
 - keep a student in after school detention
 - make a student stay at break time

I consider also of high importance to know how to talk about students who are absent or late. When I began to work as a bilingual teacher, I noticed that these were sentences I have to use quite often and I did not have a clue how to say them in English. It took me some time to discover it and use them properly.
 - call the register (if you read it aloud) or take the register (if you or a student writes down who is missing or absent)
 - being absent or being late
 - a parents', guardian' s or doctor' s note
 - justify and absence......

Working in the lab. How to move around and how to talk about preparing solutions

Once you all know the name of all the lab equipment (The bilingual lab), what about learning how to talk about the actions you may carry out in the lab? Here you have a few, just to begin with:

Besides, one of the main activities students have to deal with in their first days in the Science lab is to prepare solutions. It may be handy to know some expressions related to it, so that students can communicate in proper english and know what they mean.

Scientific method in the bilingual class

How could you engage your students learning of Science and at the same time using of english?

Learning about the Scientific method by designing experiments to test observations and using English grammar to talk about them (conditionals and structures of possibility, probability and certainty) might be an option. Just in case you want to try, here I leave you an example of how to integrate the learning of the Scientific method stages with english languge. Below it, a templeat for your students to plan for their own experiments. Enjoy it!

Scientif method atages explained with examples (some grammar scaffolding suggested at some stages):

Worksheet to design an experiment according to the Scientific method stages:

How to text in English. Some examples

As non-native english speakers, it is difficult for us to text in English as natives do. Having a look at some examples may give you some clues so that you can begin to practice your texting.
Just try to do this activity first, andthen, try to create new messages based on these ones.

The bilingual lab

If you are to teach in English also in the Science lab, have a look at these resources I have prepared to help you and your students to learn the names of the different parts of the lab and material.

It may be interesting to engage your students into defining what the main use of every one of these materials is, and it would be sensible to provide them with some scaffolding such as the following:

An Integrated Didactic CLIL Unit

Today I just came accross an Integrated didaced Unit I made long time ago for a collaboration with the Ministry of  Education. It was intended for 3º ESO students and deals with the topic of health and disease. Hope you can find it interesting and leave you here the link to the student's material. 

STUDENT'S MATERIAL 

You can also get the teacher's material if you register and follow my blog. I promise to create and publish more interesting material.

Activating CLIL......putting the theory into practice

An app to engage discussion in the classroom

Here you have an app that attempts to make from the Internet a place to deliberative and to open debate. KIALO www.kialo.com
Through this app you can debate anything, big or small. It has been designed to keep decisions balanced, claer and concise from both sides, making easy to weigh the pros and cons. You can dive as deep into the debate as you want, just click on an argument and other supporting or opposing claims will be display.

Rewordify

One of the harder things a CLIL teacher must do is crete material and adapt teaching materials to their students' english level. Here I leave you one online application to simplify difficult English text into simpler ones.  REWORDIFY- https://rewordify.com/
With Rewordify.com you just have to enter hard sentences (or whole chapters) into the yellow box at the top of the page. (You can also enter a web site URL. Click Rewordify text and you'll instantly see an easier version, for fast understanding. The reworded words are highlighted— click them to hear and learn the original harder word. You can change how the highlighting works to match the way you learn!