SARAH BRESLIN
CRISTINA BARRY
Workshop:
Using CLIL in the classroom
In this workshop, we will examine the theory and principles behind CLIL and explore the pros and the cons if using CLIL in the English Language Classroom. By taking part in demo lessons, participants will be given the support and the tools needed to create challenging and engaging CLIL lessons, which will be tailored to their own students and teaching context. By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to take home practical ideas for creating lessons and materials, and for finding resources and activities that will appeal to all students and will get them actively involved in the lesson.
Profile:
Cristina has been working at British Council Naples since 2013 as an English teacher and, recently, as the Assistant YL co-ordinator. She is specialised in Young Learners and is interested in SEN (Special Educational Needs), Teacher training and development, and CLIL.
SOPHIE BENNETT
Creativity
Workshop for Primary School Teachers
EMMA DAFOUZ MILNE
DONATELLA FITZGERALD
TIM GOODIER
NICKY HOCKLY
Nicky is Director of Pedagogy of The Consultants-E (www.theconsultants-e.com), and has been involved in ELT since 1987. She is author of several prize-winning methodology books about technology in English language teaching, and she gives plenary talks and runs training courses all over the world. Her research interests include blended and online learning. Nicky lives in Barcelona, and is a technophobe turned technophile.
MANUELA KELLY-CALZINI (Trinity College London)
Assessment is a notoriously challenging area to address in CLIL, and there are key questions as to the impact of assessment criteria on learning and whether there is a role for the CEFR or for established examination systems. How can assessment, even if non-CLIL specific, support CLIL learning objectives? Can the tasks used in assessment promote and develop learning strategies and thinking skills conducive to success in a CLIL programme?
This practical workshop seeks to demonstrate how teaching practices can be enhanced through constructive alignment, exploring the relationship between assessment, classroom activities and explicitly stated learning outcomes; highlighting the importance of clarity between them and the potential positive washback of applying a rigorous assessment system to a CLIL programme. Through a demonstration CLIL lesson constructed with specific reference to assessment criteria, this session introduces a taxonomy of tasks to engage increasing levels of critical thinking and incorporates declared learner outcomes. The objective is not only to demonstrate how content learning can be enhanced but also to show how application of tasks aligned to a valid system of assessment can limit learner reliance on processing memory and aid long-term language acquisition. The workshop explores how preparation for a CLIL compatible exam and use of explicit assessment criteria can help the development of learner skills and enhance both performance and achievement.
Manuela qualified as a CLIL practitioner in 2007 and since then has been involved in CLIL research projects with Italian and EU partners and recently led a network of primary and secondary lower schools in an EU-funded project to investigate Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL). The innovative development of CLIL in mainstream education in Italy led to a 2015/2017 cycle of workshops and training events throughout the country “Getting Teachers CLILed up!”
JAMES PURPURA Columbia University, New York
Plenary:
The Affordances of Using Scenario-Based Assessment for a Comprehensive Measurement of Content and Language-Integrated Learning Outcomes
The enduring promise of content-and-language-integrated-learning is that language curricula will be contextualized within some discipline-specific domain (e.g., ecology), where learners are exposed to and assisted with both disciplinary content (facts, concepts, generalizations) and associated linguistic content so that they will later be able to integrate and use these topical and communicative resources to perform simple and complex tasks that they would likely encounter in a real-life domain related to the discipline. Given that CLIL is situated in disciplinary practices, CLIL instruction is not just about content or effective communication standards—that is, the acquisition and integration of disciplinary content and related communicative resources, but it is equally about how learners need to use content and communication competencies to perform disciplinary specific tasks that potentially tap into, among other factors, a host of complex socio-cognitive processes (e.g., abstraction, reasoning, collaborative problem-solving). An example of such a situation would be when student ecologists are placed in a scenario where they have to work collaboratively to reason through a problem related to the potential impact on an ecosystem of the potential loss of one species in the food chain due to new construction. A successful resolution to this problem certainly involves the acquisition and integration of discipline-specific language and content related to this problem. However, success in this situation is also moderated by factors such as problem comprehension, peer instruction, reasoning skills, cognitive load, feedback and assistance processes, collaboration strategies, and socio-affective strategies. Given the number of factors involved in this real-life situation, what CLIL outcomes would be want to measure and how can we account for the moderating effects of the other factors? Or even, how can we structure the assessment task in a way that would require learners to engage in the kinds of complex processes they might encounter in a real-life problem solving task of this sort?
The purpose of the plenary is to discuss the potential of scenario-based language assessment (SBA) as a technique for eliciting performance and measuring a broadened range of constructs related to the assessment of CLIL outcomes. We will first define SBA. Then we will describe how scenarios, conceptualized as a purposeful set of carefully sequenced, thematically-related tasks designed to simulate real-life performance, can provide a concrete mechanism for measuring expanded range of theoretical constructs related to CLIL. The plenary then will show with an example how learning-oriented assessment can be used as a theoretical framework for designing SBAs. Finally, using the LOA framework, we will compare potential affordances of trait-based, task-based, and scenario-based assessment.
Workshop:
Using a Learning-Orient Assessment Framework to Design Scenario-Based Assessments of CLIL
In recent years, advances in technology, theory, and educational practice have opened the door for innovations in language assessment design and delivery. Simultaneously, the ways in which people communicate, collaborate, and apply problem-solving skills in real life contexts, and especially those with a disciplinary focus associated with CLIL instruction, have changed significantly. Despite these changes, the assessments used to measure these skills have not kept pace with how people apply their language knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) in real world settings. Nor have they explored how assessments can be structured to impact student learning and performance, but can, perhaps more interestingly, conceptualize assessment as a learning event in and of itself. This workshop addresses the opportunities (and challenges) of refocusing assessment that has traditionally centered on the display of performance, to one that also support learning and instruction.
A recent approach to assessment that has shown great promise for measuring expanded constructs has been scenario-based assessment (SBA). Initiated by the CBALTM project (Bennett, 2010; Bennett & Gitomer, 2009) to address the limitations of traditional assessment related to math and English language arts in U.S. elementary and secondary schools, SBA is designed in a way that learners can demonstrate their knowledge, skills, and abilities in a meaningful and goal-oriented context. Through the utilization of a careful sequence of thematically-related tasks along with simulated interaction, SBA offers opportunities to elicit and measure learners’ independent and integrated language skills, topical knowledge, and strategy use (Sabatini et al., 2014; Purpura, 2016) across a goal-oriented task.
The current workshop provides participants with a rationale for SBA and will outline the affordances of SBA for the assessment of CLIL outcomes. The workshop will then introduce participants to Purpura and Turner’s (2016) learning oriented assessment framework (pre-reading for the workshop). Then, using an example, the workshop will demonstrate how this framework can be used to design SBAs. We will spend the rest of the time in a lock-step approach designing an SBA. To do this, participants will need to bring a laptop with PowerPoint installed on it. All materials to design the assessment will be shared electronically in the workshop.
Profile:
James E. Purpura is Professor of linguistics and education in the Applied Linguistics and TESOL Program at Teachers College, Columbia University, where he teaches L2 assessment and L2 research methods. Besides his publications in journals and edited volumes, Jim’ scholarly books include: Strategy use and language test performance: A structural equation modeling approach (CUP); Assessing grammar (CUP). He is currently working on Learning-oriented assessment in language classrooms: Using assessments to gauge and promote language learning (with C. E. Turner) (Routledge) and The writings of L. F. Bachman: “Assuring that what we count counts” in language assessment (with A. J. Kunnan) (Routledge). Jim is currently the co-editor of Language Assessment Quarterly (with C. Leung), and is series co-editor of New Perspectives on Language Assessment (with A. J. Kunnan) (Routledge) and Language Assessment at ETS: Innovation and Validation (with J. Norris, S. Ross, & X. Xi) (Routledge). He was the President of the International Language Testing Association (2007-2008), and is an expert consultant for the European Association of Language Testing and Assessment. He served for several years on the Committee of Examiners at ETS, and currently serves on the Defense Language Testing Advisory Panel in Washington, D.C. In 2017, Jim was a Fulbright Scholar at the University for Foreigners of Siena.
PETRULA SKOULLOU
JANE SPIRO
This plenary will share examples of projects which connect writers with physical place - its geology, mythology, history and aesthetics. These projects include physical journeys through actual landscapes,, and metaphorical journeys from childhood to adulthood. The plenary will consider how engagement with knowledge and place can be triggers for creativity. Principles for a pedagogy of place will be shared, as well as practical examples showing how it can lead to creativity for learners of different ages and proficiency.
Workshop:
Journeys from, journeys to
This workshop will give participants the opportunity to try out for themselves the different 'journey' and 'place' activities described in the plenary. They will be taken through a series of physical and metaphysical journeys, and invited to share, collate and reinvent knowledge about place in order to create something new. The workshop will lead towards recommendations for a pedagogy of place with learners of all ages, a rationale for its use, and practical ideas to learn and develop language creatively across the curriculum.
RUSSELL STANNARD
