Module 4 - Competence

Module 4 – Competence

In this module you will consider the implications of Competence for both CLIL teachers and CLIL students.

Competence is one of the 5 Cs of CLIL. It refers to the measurable or observable knowledge, skills, abilities, and behaviours critical to successful performance.

Competences reflect successful learning outcomes. They are often subject-specific and are an automatic part of any teacher’s lesson planning.

Learning Stages:

Go to your Learning Diary and do Task 1 – Subject-specific competences.
Competence as one of the 5 Cs of CLIL can have a wider application than just Content knowledge. It is useful to consider Competence in other applications
1. For example, 'CLIL Teacher competences' support the development of a rich CLIL learning environment in a wide variety of contexts.
2. Look at the diagram below, which shows areas of competence for CLIL teachers, and consider the relative importance of each to you in your own teaching context.

Go to your Learning Diary and do:
Task 2 – Assessing your own competences as a CLIL teacher
Task 3 – Planning to develop your competences.
If you would like to read about CLIL Teacher competences in more detail, click here.
‘Can Do’ statements are a useful way of defining competences .
An excellent example of their use for defining language competences is seen the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. This internationally recognised framework describes language ability in a scale of levels which ranges from A1 for beginners to C2 for those who have mastered a language.
Go to your Learning Diary and do Task 4 – Assessing your level of English.
In the Module on Cognition, we looked at Bloom’s Taxonomy of Thinking Skills. However, as well as thinking skills, Bloom’s Taxonomy describes different types of knowledge.
- Factual knowledge (the basic elements of a subject), eg knowing musical symbols, or major natural resources
- Conceptual knowledge (how parts of the whole are related), eg how periods of geological time are classified, or models used to explain ideas, such as the Theory of Evolution
- Procedural knowledge (how to do something), eg whole number division, or how to conduct a scientific experiment
- Metacognitive knowledge (understanding of how to learn), eg how to write an outline summary of a text, or the best method (for the individual student) of learning new information
Click here to see an interactive diagram showing the relationship between thinking skills, activities and different types of knowledge.
Can Do statements as learning outcomes are often a combination of the thinking skills in Bloom’s Taxonomy and and the types of knowledge he defined.
We can use Bloom’s Wheel to write Can Do statements using a verb to describe the cognitive process, together with the type of knowledge that the student is expected to develop.

1. See the examples clearly labelled in the table below:

9. Go to your Learning Diary and do Task 5 – Writing Can Do statements.

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