Social Science CLIL: Activities and Language Support
Supporting the Language Needs of Social Sciences
The syllabus of the English language subject was designed with the objective of working on those same cognitive processes and linguistic features. This materials creation process resulted in a detailed teacher’s guide, including the necessary strategies for classroom interaction and for guiding students’ comprehension-production, so that students appropriately assimilate Social Science contents. An additional teacher’s guide with similar characteristics was created for the materials used during English hours. The activities created for the Social Science CLIL materials can be grouped into four types of activities that are explained below:
Activities to Foster Students’ Oral and Written Communication
These activities have the objective of using communication to construct and consolidate Social Science concepts and their inherent linguistic features, as well as developing L3 communication skills. For instance, students could be asked to define a series of Social Science concepts and then read them out to one of their classmates, who, in turn, will have to guess the concept being defined. This kind of activity is a clear example of content and language integration since in order to complete the task successfully, students will need to understand the concept to be defined, know the subject-specific vocabulary, and be able to construct content-appropriate and linguistically accurate definitions.
Activities to Develop Reading Strategies
The aim of these activities is to help students to develop reading strategies that will enable them to face Social Science texts, which are usually conceptually and linguistically complex. The approach to such texts consists in giving students a task that needs to be completed with the help of the written text; in other words, reading would not be an objective per se but a tool to complete a given task. This way, the importance of reading for a specific aim is stressed, and students are guided so they can develop the appropriate strategies depending on the reading objective.
Activities to Guide Students’ Oral and Written Production
In this group of activities, we would include, on the one hand, activities for brief and controlled production with the help of guided linguistic models and, on the other hand, freer and more substantial production aided by pre-tasked language and content guidance. As for controlled production activities, these would be aimed at guaranteeing students the opportunity to prepare their interventions. Students would, therefore, be offered a series of models (linguistic and content-oriented) and given the opportunity to structure their intervention according to those models. Such models would guarantee that students with less developed communicative competence or subject knowledge would be able to intervene in class. Regarding more open and substantial interventions, such as oral presentations or written reports, students would be offered guidelines in order for them to select, organize, and communicate information efficiently.
Activities to Develop Higher Cognitive Skills
The objective of these activities would be to make students think. Besides being crucial for significant learning to happen, they would offer multiple opportunities for linguistic work. These activities usually require applying what has been learned to new situations or inferring implicit information from the data or the knowledge at hand. For example, if faced with a timeline of scientists and their main contributions to science, students could be asked to classify them into rationalists or naturalists. Students will have to infer the information they need (methods, areas of research, etc.) from the information given in the timeline.
Supporting the Language Needs of Social Sciences in an English Class
As has been mentioned before, and due to the fact that SSLIC was aimed at students with various degrees of mastery of the target language, the Ikastolas reorganized the existing English syllabus and its corresponding materials in such a way that they would work on the specific linguistic characteristics of the language used in Social Sciences. This reorganization involved a linguistic analysis of the Social Science objectives, content, and didactic materials, which led to the identification of a series of text genres and skills students needed to master in order to be successful in that discipline. Following the text genre classification used in the Ikastolas for the development of their Basque and Spanish language curricula, these new English materials were designed mainly around the following three fields of usage: the academic field, the mass media (which is one of the most important information sources in Social Sciences), and the field of interpersonal relations. Table 1 shows a summary of the main text genres and skills that characterize the language of Social Sciences. A set of English materials was therefore created to work on those text genres, skills, and related linguistic elements. Those materials were organized around a series of didactic units composed of activities arranged towards the comprehension and production of a specific text genre and the development of the skills and linguistic features required by each genre. This kind of work enables students to transfer what they have learned or what they are learning in English hours to the tasks they perform in their Social Science CLIL lessons. For this transfer to really happen, of course, coordination between both English instructors and Social Science teachers is crucial, since making the links between the two subjects explicit facilitates the transfer of such knowledge. In addition to the Social Science subject itself, the Ikastolas’ Integrated Language Curriculum is an important source for the new English syllabus. In other words, English materials rely not only on the previous work done around those text genres and skills in English but also on how students have been dealing with those genres and skills in their other language disciplines, that is, Basque and Spanish.