Linking Language Learning, Communication, and Bloom’s Taxonomy
Linking Language Learning and Bloom’s Thinking Skills
For over fifty years, Benjamin Bloom’s taxonomy (and its revisions) has been a fundamental tool for establishing learning objectives. This hierarchy follows the progression of thinking processes from lower-order skills to higher-order skills.
Language learning requires acquiring thinking skills according to Benjamin Bloom’s taxonomy. Therefore, it is possible to apply this theory to plan teacher’s work and design learning activities based on it.
There are benefits to using it. For example, you can adapt the learning process to your pupils’ level of knowledge, and you can know if they are well-trained for the next level. However, it can be difficult to determine which level an activity belongs to and the individual student’s level.
To design an activity, you have a list of verbs related to each thinking skill. You have to choose the level, and then you have some possibilities. For example, if you have selected the Remember level (according to Anderson’s revision), you could design activities where the learners have to list, describe, find, etc. For instance, one wording of an exercise would be: ‘Find all the words in the list which are related to forestry’. The complexity of the tasks increases as you go up to higher-order skills.
To summarize, we must never forget the utility of this taxonomy, especially in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), because you have to combine the subject and the language, and you might need to know when the task is demanding or undemanding.
Writing Activity Unit 2
The Council of Europe is an international organization that aims to protect and develop linguistic diversity in a multicultural environment. It defines plurilingualism as the simultaneous presence of two or more languages in a person’s communicative competence and the interrelationship established between them. They consider plurilingualism a fundamental competence in the most advanced societies. It implies that the languages offered in educational institutions should be diversified, and students should be given the opportunity to develop plurilingual competence.
According to that dimension, the new Decree, developed by the Valencian Government, has many benefits for the learning community.
First, it guarantees the right of families to receive school learning in their mother tongue if it’s one of the co-official languages. Because the Decree is based on an enrichment model, it guarantees the same treatment to Valencian and Spanish and permits incorporating another language, preferentially English.
Furthermore, the Decree offers students the opportunity to enhance their language skills in more than one or two languages. It contributes to creating citizens who are more competent, more respectful of other cultures, and more integrated into our multicultural European society (as students are supposed to be).
On another front, schools have the framework to plan their plurilingual education in definite programs and have many possibilities depending on their sociocultural context. Moreover, innovation promotes teaching non-linguistic subjects in foreign languages, that is, the participation of most subjects of the curriculum in acquiring language competences.
To summarize, the new Decree turns our education system into the modern conception of learning a foreign language without forgetting our roots and language diversity.
CLIL Core Features and Their Importance in Teaching
The principal characteristics that define CLIL are not exclusive to that kind of learning, but they belong to the basic principles that guarantee meaningful learning in any area or sort of education.
One of the most important features consists of organizing learning from a holistic perspective. It is not exclusively centered on a single content but rather transversely integrated with other contents and subjects.
Moreover, it’s very important to create a safe environment for the students. They must feel comfortable and away from scoffing and scorn. It’s the only way to foster participation in the class. It’s necessary to establish clear rules to secure this point.
Furthermore, CLIL lessons must be connected to the interests of the pupils and related to their life and experiences. This is the right way to make learning meaningful and ensures that the students will be motivated.
In addition, another important characteristic of CLIL is that the teacher leaves the traditional role and turns into a facilitator and a guide of the learning process, giving the appropriate scaffolds to the students that help them to move up in a meaningful way.
Also, CLIL must involve all the actors of the learning community. This aspect must guarantee cooperation from parents, other teachers and students, social agents, etc., in order to assume co-responsibility in the education of our future citizenship.
In conclusion, all these features must be included in our teaching practice because they could help us and our students to achieve the learning goals and are also crucial for significant learning to take place.
Importance of ICT in CLIL Methodology
CLIL is a learning environment in which students are expected to learn the content and the language through which they access that content. In the methodology adopted in CLIL lessons, the students are seen as active actors. They learn by doing things, activities are based on their experiences and interests, teachers guide students and provide adequate scaffolds to take another step forward, and participation and collaboration are very important too.
It’s a fact that we have in our classes pupils who belong to the digital native generation and are digitally skilled and interested in technology. They love technology and use it every time (for example, smart-phones). In this way, ICT emerges as the ideal platform to develop the CLIL interactive methodology. The combination of CLIL and ICT integrates learning of knowledge and technology, which is a symbiosis that turns learning into a motivating, cohesive, accessible, and meaningful experience. Consequently, ICT becomes a source rather than a resource.
Nowadays, there are lots of ICT-based activities and different kinds of resources on the internet. For instance, we can find PowerPoint presentations, web research, webquests, activities online with interaction, and so on. They foster active participation, provide reinforcement, and serve as a database for research. Also, they contribute to understanding subject content, guide language production, and promote the improvement of thinking skills. Therefore, we could consider ICT as a scaffold in the CLIL learning process.
In brief, CLIL teachers must include ICT in their methodology and working routines. It helps to achieve significant learning, provides authentic language use, and, why not, it could reduce the gap between school and the real world.
The Benefits of Practices Through a Community of Practice
Communities of practice are a collaborative resource for knowledge generation. According to this concept of communities of practice, learning involves participation in a community, and the acquisition of knowledge is considered a collective process.
In this line, teachers should learn good educational practices because, in a community of practice, teachers can solve different knowledge problems or requests for information from different members of the community, so they interact and learn together.
The principal asset of the project is the composition of a knowledge-sharing network for the primary purpose of benefiting all members.
For example, teachers from different subjects can use a community of practices to learn and work together. We can use one topic, for example, food, and through this topic, we can share information. For instance, in the subject of History, we can learn where different foodstuffs like tomatoes or potatoes come from, in Biology, we can discover the properties of this foodstuff, and in gardening, we can study how this foodstuff are raised.
Moreover, it is very important to create educational experiences for the students. They must feel that the educational process is connecting and that they have to be in the service of the learning that happens in the world.
To sum up, this practice must be included in our teaching practice because they could help us and our students to create learning systems in various sectors and at various levels. All the members benefit from shared knowledge, and also, the professionals can re-use the proposals with the intention of improving their schools.