CLIL: activated processes
The distinctive feature of CLIL courses in English, in the fifth grade, is to promote and support the teaching of some non-linguistic disciplines (DNL) in English, ensuring the effectiveness of this new teaching/learning method and safeguarding the epistemological assumptions and the aims of the methodology itself. The design, planning and implementation of specific disciplinary modules in English ( see CLIL 2019-2020 pathways ) , are intended to encourage, among TEAM CLIL teachers, innovative teaching lines based on reasoned strategic choices with respect to the contents to be learned and the training outcomes to be achieved and on the flexibility of the organizational systems and at the same time to encourage didactic research and the evaluation of the internal teaching processes of the discipline for the improvement of the learning itself and to introduce a dimension broader culture in the curriculum. The CLIL approach is not only focused on linguistic skills and the contents conveyed, but stimulates the development of transversal skills : collaboration, creativity, citizenship, critical thinking and so on. These are essential skills for 21st century students and citizens.
Design and planning aspects of the CLIL pathway.
The choice of modular paths, activated within the various disciplines, takes into consideration specific elements of the curriculum, appropriate methodological tools and clearly identifiable disciplinary nuclei, and is shared both at the Academic Board and Department level; this makes it easier to insert the CLIL variable in English into the ordinary curriculum of the discipline, achieving the integration of language and content without compartmentalizing cognitive processes or duplicating the same path in Italian. This didactic system is particularly suitable for allowing greater control of the management of the courses, and a more careful didactic verification of the objectives also through convergent collaboration models with L2 teachers. In some cases, this collaboration provides for training, support, didacticisation of materials, monitoring, analysis of results, allowing the two disciplinary curricula to be intertwined (English and non-linguistic discipline) and to obtain significant moments of exposure to the language and in support of the CLIL methodology.