Pre-Task Planning for Speech Production in CLIL

Todays classrooms do not simply expect school-level learners to acquire knowledge (for example in biology or geography) through listening to teacher talk but also require them to actively solve problems or tasks in the respective subjects. In this way, knowledge is transformed into competences that are of use/can be applied also outside the classroom. At the same time, the ongoing spread of English to ever more contexts and situations of use has been prompting many schools to offer some of their subjects through the medium of English. In this way, they hope to provide their learners with a greater amount of input and active practice of the language they are learning as a second or foreign language. Such educational programmes are referred to as Content-and-Language-Integrated Learning, CLIL for short. Solving subject-specific tasks in English (or another foreign language) in CLIL is a double challenge for the students, not only with regard to the subject but also with regard to language. This dual load can be eased if learners make effective plans before carrying out a task. Research and experience have shown that planning does not only make it easier to solve tasks but also has a positive influence on attainment/learning success. In our study, we want to find out how one can best support lower secondary CLIL learners so that they will develop effective planning strategies in order to enhance their learning in the content subject as well as in the CLIL language (i.e. English). Over several phases of the project, subject educators will collaborate with language specialists designing interesting and engaging tasks. Students will share with the researchers how they go about solving such subject specific (e.g. geography) tasks and what types of planning strategies they employ. The research team will analyse these strategies, comparing them to the learning outcomes. Based on the results, the expert team will develop strategy training sessions that will be taught to groups of students. Finally, the effectiveness of the strategy trainings will be evaluated. The final product of the study will be a package of training sequences that subject teachers can use in order to help all students to develop effective task planning strategies in order to support their learning in a CLIL context.