WHAT IS YOUR IDEA OF EXTENSIVE READING?

What is your idea of Extensive Reading? Have you ever tried it with your students? How? If not, how would you do it? Write a brief paragraph (about 300 words) commenting on your experience (if any) and/or on your "Extensive Reading in CLIL lesson plan" you produced in Week 4 with particular focus on the impact of the language dimension.

I have been a lover of books and I have learnt a lot thanks to extensive reading in my mother tongue and in the foreign languages I studied at secondary school and at university.

I think that we can enhance the students' Language skills both in reading and in writing if we find a way for helping them learn on their own too.

Reading a book can be a hard task- I chose an upper-intermediate book (Agnes Gray) for my students in a LICEO ARTISTICO in Italy. My idea was to help them widen their lexis and reading competences while Learning about a century full of contraditions.

The project which I devised has to do with the theme " Women and the Victorian Age". I would like my students to be able to work on this issue as they might discover and find out a lot of interesting data about the Victorian society( they would do it in HISTORY, HISTORY OF ART and also ITALIAN and ENGLISH).

By reading, organizing their information based on " online sources" they could put into practise extensive reading but also reading for details and they would work on their own presentations. The next step would be to work together as a Group and produce a padlet with lots of interesting documents and also their comments. They would use the new Language acquired and they would also learn better as they would organize their knowledge.

The idea is to work on English texts, working online and collaborating, sharing information and making a presentation.

All these skills are important. We should not forget that by reading in English our students can learn more about other countries and their cultures.

The project would have links with HISTORY OF ART as my students study in a liceo artistico.

This work will help them develop as learners and they will become active learners thank to the use of technology and modern tools.

FINAL CONCLUSIONS

A positive experience which will continue in the next months and in the next years as in my school we do not have teachers who have specialized in CLIL and as an English Language Teacher I am expected to do a lot of work to cope with the needs of my students.