Wednesday, 16. October 2019

Today we were picked up in the morning from the hotel "Salini" and were driven to EC Malta in St. Julians. After a brief placement test we were divided into two groups. Our teacher Sam started with a short video from Heather Hensen. Her conclusion at a TED Talk was that it´s not necessary to speak english perfectly. Instead it´s more important to speak the language in a way that allows you to communicate appropriate with other people. Luckily that was also the opinion of our teacher Sam, so that was a bit of a relieve. ;)

After a short definition of CLIL the teacher presented us an overall structure for CLIL-lessons:

1. processing the text
2. identify and organise knowledge
3. language identification
4. tasks for the students

Also he told us that there are to ways to understand a text and he would recommend both:

1. bottom up: It means, that someone tries to understand language by looking at the individual words or the grammatics and moves then from these to trying to understand the whole text.

2. top down: It means, that someone is not concerned with the details of a text but rather tries to uses background information to predict the meaning of the language.

After the theory we planned and presented our own CLIL-lesson using the overall structure mentioned above. Beside this topics we also talked about "syllable and word stress" which is very useful to know if you want to pronounce the words in a proper way.

In the afternoon we had a great guided tour through the capital city of Malta. Valletta with his long history and changing rulers (Phoenician, Romanes, Goths, Ottomans, Hospitaller Order, the British) is a really unique place with interesting details.