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- The ReCLes.pt CLIL project in practice: teaching with results in higher educationPublication . Arau Ribeiro, María del Carmen; Morgado, Margarida; Chumbo, Isabel; Gonçalves, Ana; Silva, Manuel; Coelho, MargaridaBased on the project partially funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), the ReCLes.pt CLIL initiative created communities of practice and learning for Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) in Higher Education. The project was implemented in six polytechnic institutes in Portugal to support and develop teaching in English based on a methodology that integrates content and language while attending to learners’ needs in both areas. Despite the growing number of English as a Medium of Instruction classes in Higher Education, there remains a paucity of CLIL in the country, both at this and at other levels, although neighboring Spain, for example, has demonstrated an ample use of the CLIL approach, especially in primary and secondary schools. This paper provides an opportunity to get to know these communities of practice and learning in Higher Education to better understand the various ways of dealing with this concept, involving not only the English teachers but also the specific subject teachers in training. This contribution also covers the basis for this training, how the groups are formed, ways to make them work, and best practice as well as results related to monitoring and assessment over the initial three years of the project. The variety of topics and tools created for the 33 piloted modules by these communities of CLIL practice and learning have been published as part of the project. In many cases, continue to be specifically designed and then implemented and assessed in Portuguese Higher Education based on the ReCLes.pt CLIL Training Guide (Morgado et al., 2015).
- Teacher training forCLIL in Higher Education: challenges in blended learningPublication . Moreira Silva, Manuel; Ribeiro, Maria; Morgado, Margarida; Coelho, MargaridaResearchers and foreign language teachers of ReCLes.pt (the Network Association of Language Centers in Higher Education in Portugal) would like to share recent research on a blended learning format for teacher training for CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), based on a course carried out in the 2nd semester of 2016/2017 for teachers at four geographically disperse polytechnic instituts in Portugal. The course was implemented in these four different educational environments and had as trainees teachers of other subjects, representing specialty areas such as Experimental and Exact Sciences, Technology, Engineering, and Management. Together, the trainers from each of the four schools designed and carried out the teacher training, online and in loco, with initial face-to-face (F2F) sessions to establish a community of practice and a common objective – to learn to create conditions for learning that simultaneously promote the proposed subject and the foreign language through which it is taught. The framework of the b-learning course is the widely-used CLIL Training Guide (Morgado et al. 2015), available at http://recles.pt/, which includes techniques for scaffolding to build new concepts upon previously acquired competences and terminologically-inspired approaches and instruments for acquiring the much-needed specialist terminology of each subject. Also covered are the principles of how to teach effectively through English, activating and consolidating linguistic competences, considering aspects of classroom management and student learning styles. The assynchronous and F2F sessions also consisted of individual orientation and tutorial work with the teacher trainees, followed by classroom observation of the resulting CLIL module and interviews with the students and the teacher trainees. By ensuring the best possible application of the teachers’ new teaching competences, we aim to better understand just how students in higher education are receiving this new approach to learning through a foreign language. Overall, the present experience will serve for further national and international editions of this valuable opportunity to be trained in CLIL for higher education as it has allowed for reflection on the potential and the challenges for blended learning – ranging from the cohesion, distribution, and relevance of the topics covered to management of time for executing the assignments and to issues related to personal learning spaces. Learner satisfaction (for the teacher trainers and the students of these higher education CLIL modules) is high although realistic expectations about time are a consistent difficulty to be negotiated.