Our CLIL methodology is largely learning by doing, reflecting teaching in Anglia School with very young learners. Participants see examples from our classroom practice with our children. Lastly, participants are engaged in workshop sessions where we work through principles behind the practice observed.
Intercultural communicative competence is developed throughout our curriculum and we implement this skill area by developing learning experiences which enable children to look at ‘self’ and ‘other’. Participants are asked to practice similar activities in workshops, and suggest and create activities for their curricula where this competence can be developed.
Anglia School methodology employs ‘up-down’ dynamics during lessons where our activities are specially targeted to meet children’s learning needs. In practice, we prepare activities to move between more and less dynamic experiences in order that our learners can maximize their learning potential. Participants are asked to consider this dynamic factor in sequencing activities they practice and materials they produce.
We develop a wide range of age-appropriate curriculum learning skills (sorting, comparing, measuring etc.), which are presented in our lesson materials and followed by discussion of principles and how to best recycle and consolidate these skills over time. Participants are invited to show this sequencing and recycling of skills in the materials they produce.
A lot of time is invested in appropriate task sequencing from input to output and participants are presented with a rich range of early-years input content materials where methods used to help children process these inputs is explicitly shown, similarly where our learners are asked to speak in English, a lot of thought goes in to how we support their talk and participants see this scaffolding in our course materials. Participants are asked to make use of this ‘guided input’ and ‘supported output’ in their own materials writing.