CLIL: SOCIOLOGY SESSIONS

Author: Román Alvarez              School: INS Cal Gravat

I decided to do my CLIL sessions during Sociology class because the group was rather small and had a decent level of English, with one student having even lived in Ireland for a year. The other classes I was teaching, Philosophy and History of Philosophy were too complicated and abstract or had other more pressing goals to reach (achieving the required level of the basic compentencies and preparing for the PAU, respectively). Sociology also offered a content which was closer to the students experiences, more relatable and easier to explain. 

The sessions where organized around three types of social phenomenons that cause conflicts in society: social inequality, globalization and religious fundamentalism. The first class would be about introducing the content and processing the information and the second one would be about working on and with this new knowledge.

Final project

Student-teacher interaction video

Student-student interaction video

Conclusion

Doing regular classes in English has been an interesting experience. The students have enjoyed it as well although several issues have arised. While they ended up speaking in English confidently, initially they would struggle a bit and were shy, so some form of game could be done to ease them into speaking in English during that hour. The fact that we had only two hours a week (one of them being the final hour of the day) and that they would often have to skip them for one trip or another made it a bit diffcult to keep a continuity as we would often do only one hour a week. 

When based around personal experience, students would have an easier time discussing the subject but with more wider subjects like globalization they struggled a bit so they would benefit from more guidance the next time.

Overall one of the main difficulties I encountered was finding time to prepare the sessions as in Baccaulerate classes tend to be very content heavy and from the videos I have seen, CLIL class specifications seem to work better with students from primary and ESO where they have less information to absorb in one class and can put more focus on improving the language skills specifically. The difficulty in preparing a class normally already rises from one course to the next but I really felt that with CLIL it rose exponentially.