Understanding Learning Styles, Motivation, and CLIL in Education
Learning Styles
Learning style is the way individuals approach the task of learning. It involves control, autonomy, and cognitive regulation of the learning process.
Styles are tendencies that change with age and in different situations.
Learning strategies are specific actions, behaviors, steps, or techniques students use, often consciously, to improve their progress in apprehending, internalizing, and using the foreign language.
- Metacognitive: Regulate their learning process.
- Affective: Learners’ emotional requirements.
- Social strategies: Increased interaction with L2.
- Cognitive: Understood as the mental strategies learners use to make sense of their learning.
Choose One Learning Style
Visual learners:
- Enjoy remembering scenes, objects, or faces many years later.
- Enjoy graphs, charts, posters, and displays.
- See words
- Look upwards
- Use predicates: “I see what you mean.”
Motivation
Differences in intensity and direction of behavior. It is the state that results from a combination of individual needs and desires of the situation.
- Integrative motivation: To learn the language in order to relate to the target language culture.
- Instrumental motivation: Concerned with students’ practical reasons for learning the foreign language.
Multiple Intelligences: Gardner
- Linguistic intelligence.
- Logical/mathematical intelligence.
- Visual intelligence.
- Musical intelligence.
- Interpersonal intelligence.
- Intrapersonal intelligence.
- Kinesthetic intelligence.
- Environmental intelligence.
- Existential intelligence.
Nine Golden Rules for Educators
Explain one:
- Include all pupils: Diversity should be recognized and respected. Let the pupils discover for themselves how to work together with their peers. Similar work may need to be done at parent-teacher meetings.
- Communicate.
- Manage the classroom.
- Plan your lessons.
- Plan for individuals and give individual help.
- Use assistive aids.
- Manage behavior.
- Work together: Take time to observe how other teachers manage their classes and invite colleagues to watch your teaching.
Classroom Management: Focus on Information
- Classroom language: The FL classroom is a good context for real communication to take place, and English may be used in it for a variety of purposes. No matter how intense the use of the FL may be in the classroom, there will always be a role for the L1, ideally a complementary one. For an acceptable input to be provided in the FL, it is necessary that this is contextualized, repeated, and varied.
- The PPP approach: Presentation-Practice-Production approach. At the presentation stage, the teacher introduces a particular language item. During the practice stage, the teacher usually proceeds from providing controlled manipulation of the language to a more guided production. In the production stage, the learners’ attention is less directed to practice where the focus is primarily on communication and fluency.
- Giving instruction: Effective instructions contribute to the success of a lesson. Some recommendations: plan your instructions for class activities, attract the students’ attention before giving instructions, use simple, easy-to-understand language, demonstrate and give examples, and get feedback from the students.
- Giving feedback: Feedback may be provided to children in either formal or informal ways from a variety of sources.
What is CLIL?
CLIL aims to introduce students to new ideas and concepts in traditional curriculum subjects, using the foreign language as the medium of communication. In other words, to enhance the pupils’ learning experience by exploiting the synergies between the two subjects.
Content and Language Integrated Learning
Involves teaching curricular subjects through the medium of a language other than that normally used. The subject can be entirely unrelated to language learning.
For example, history lessons being taught in English in a school in Spain. CLIL is taking place and has been found to be effective in all sectors of education, from primary.
Teachers working with CLIL are fluent speakers of the target language, bilingual, or native speakers.
Four Benefits of CLIL
- Builds intercultural knowledge and understanding.
- Develops multilingual interests and attitudes.
- Does not require extra teaching hours.
- Diversifies methods and forms of classroom practice.