Resources for Teachers

Italian Resources

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"Fare CLIL" is organized in three parts: 

Part 1 provides the "theoretical" underpinnings of "CLIL inItaly", written by 

• Gisella Lange (MIUR: the rules and regulations regarding CLIL in Italy; investments in teacher-training programmes, etc.), 

• Letiza Cinganotti (INDIRE; teacher-training in Italy) and

• Silvia Minardi (LEND: the importance of Language in Content Learning)

in Part 2, I look at CLIL through four chapters:

• "I for Integration", which looks at learning in general from the stance of neuroscience

• "C for Content, for which we need Language" which illustrates how CLIL can help content teachers delineate more effective ways of providing complex content information to their students. 

• "L for Language for which Content is necessary" which discusses how CLIL can help language teachers move beyond informal registers ("hello my name is Francesco") into the complex academic and disciplinary discourse that today's students will need to find professional jobs in the future.

• "I for Integration" gives examples of how to CLIL instructional materials can be designed so to establish a symbiotic relationship between Content and Language.  This section also illustrates certain poor and ineffective CLIL materials that have been developed by teachers I have trained, explains why these are ineffective (based on the notions presented in the previous three chapters of this Section) and discuss how these materials might be improved. 

Part 3 of this book is comprised of five chapters which presents teachers' classroom research on CLIL.

• 3.1. Two teachers (Chemistry and English) working with very weak students in a professional high school"agrario" who, through CLIL enabled these very weak students to comprehend complex content and also master complex disciplinary discourse, in both Italian and English.

• 3.2.  An Art History teacher reports classroom data from a CLIL experience and discusses why "doing CLIL"  calls for a new "forma mentis".

• 3.3. A Physics/Maths teacher illustrates the evolution of CLIL materials that she and her colleagues had developed: from materials that were ineffective to materials that then allowed students to learn the complex concept of "waves" in upper secondary physics.

• 3.4. Two English teachers reflect on the implementation of a bilingual programme in their school which is based on the IGCSE certifications in content (coordinated science, geography,  maths. etc.) 

• 3.5. Two middle-school English teachers report on how a CLIL mindset helped them optimize a school excursion to the EXPO, making sure that "hands-on learning" is transformed into "minds-on learning".

This "CLIL Operational Manual" was written to accompany two CLIL-textbooks published by Zanichelli.  

The first is "NaturalScience.CLIL" and the other is 

"Maths.CLIL" which I published together with science and maths colleagues.   

These booklets illustrate exactly what we mean when we say "designing CLIL materials based on tasks to do, not texts to read".  

In fact, entire learning progressions in both books are  based on sequences of tasks which  prompt students to work actively  and interactively.  Here. we put into full practice "teacher as guide": a teacher who is not "busy explaining and lecturing in front of the class" becomes a freely moving expert who can circulate among the students and interact with them in ways which support students' personal personal growth as inquisitive learners.

Both books come with a free "Teacher's Guide" which also explain what is being learnt through each task.  As such these Teacher's Guides also provide a form of "teacher-training".

Unfortunately, I cannot upload the two books, however the two Teacher's Guides and the Operational Handbook are free to teachers via the Zanichelli site.  Below is the Operational Handbook.