Introduction
In the modern world useful foreign language skills have become an absolute necessity for most people: effective and creative language use is of utmost importance for everybody’s life and career. The ability to speak and use foreign languages in a variety of situations would enable people to participate successfully in an increasingly international learning and work environment.
Consequently, in our fast-paced world it has become increasingly important to learn languages effectively, with the purpose of learning in mind. Looking at the other side of the coin, choosing the right teaching approach and the best method has become a question of top priority for all teachers, as well as for all teacher training students.
The teaching material, entitled Content-Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) focuses on an internationally acknowledged and effective form of teaching foreign languages, a method, which successfully combines content and context with language learning. The theoretical principle in the background of CLIL is the idea that language learning, when being used in meaningful contexts, is highly successful. As a result, the CLIL method has been widely used in many countries of the world.
The target audience of this teaching material is lower primary teacher trainees, who plan to teach their lessons or parts of their lessons in the lower primary classroom through English.
Units 1 – 4 aim to bring together CLIL theory and practice, its various perspectives and examples of good practice from different parts of Europe. These units also aim to combine theory and practice by identifying tips and tricks of CLIL teaching and including many examples from international classroom practice. When working with these units, the users of the teaching material will have the opportunity to learn about CLIL theory and practice, CLIL history, CLIL policies and the practical aspects of the use of CLIL in classroom teaching.
Units 5 – 10 include texts, tasks and exercises from the areas of arts and crafts, literature, civilization, geography, biology, maths and sciences. With the help of these interactive units users will be able to expand and solidify their relevant vocabulary, improve their own language skills, and, at the same time, get ideas how to teach these (and similar) topics in an interesting and creative way in classroom work.
The lessons themselves are literally colourful and they feature a lot of pictures and photos; they all serve as prompts to compare and contrast, or, simply, to discuss a topic. Quizzes and mini-tests serve the purposes of revision or self-check.
Unit 11 offers a sample lesson plan, which can be extremely useful for teacher training students.
Unit 12 is a comprehensive test. By completing it students can check how successfully they have acquired the vocabulary items and have improved their language skills.
All the learning materials have been digitalized in order to offer a more enjoyable learning experience and to make it possible for students to work on their own as well. On the other hand, all the topics and tasks can be used in the language classroom as well, and all the materials can be adapted by teachers to pair work or group work.
By compiling these materials and offering them to a variety of language learners, the authors would like to wish all users, including teacher training students, practicing teachers and all those interested in the topic, an enjoyable and successful learning experience.
Szeged, 2015
The Authors