Seminars,lectures and symposia

【CLIL Workshop Series 10 】 Designing CLIL Materials with “The Brain” and “Literacy” in Mind

Date2024.11.10 (Sunday) 13:30~16:45
Lecturer

  Y.L. Teresa Ting     University of Calabria, Italy

Venue

Room L821 ,Central Library, Sophia University,  Yotsuya Campus(Doors open 13:00)

Access Gide

Registration

Please register using the QR code by  November 5.

Lecturer Bio

Teresa Ting is a tenure-track Senior Researcher in English Applied Linguistics at the University of Calabria, Italy. She holds Degrees in both Biology and Psychology (Muskingum, Ohio, USA) and a PhD in Neurobiology (Kent State, Ohio, USA), studying learning and memory in rodent models and teaching Functional Human Neuroanatomy to medical students. Upon moving to Italy and given the opportunity to teach English, she completed an MA-TEFL (East Anglia, UK). Teresa’s approach to CLIL is thus grounded in a “Cognitive Neuroscience approach to STEM Education”. CLIL materials she developed received the 2013 British Council ELTons Award for Innovative Writing; she has: developed secondary-level CLIL materials for the CUP Talent Series; held leadership roles in CLIL and Education Research projects (ECML, Erasmus, COST, etc.); published in various journals (IJBEB, ELTJ, etc.).

Abstract

In this Workshop, we will “be students”, and experience learning using CLIL materials which have been designed with the brain and productive literacy in mind. We will also occasionally stop and “be teachers”, to review what cognitive neuroscience research tells us about how the brain learns, or not.  In fact, it should concern us that CLIL, especially at post-primary levels, actually means “the learning of complex unfamiliar Content through an oftentimes not-so-familiar foreign language”, clearly not a very brain-friendly learning situation. Thus, the need to design more “brain-aware CLIL instruction” which harness our brain’s ability to learn implicitly as well as its natural state of enjoying learning (yes, you read that correctly).
And, if we can also strategize the CLIL-foreign-language so that it facilitates, rather than blocks, the comprehension of complex concepts, even better! One way to achieve this challenging endeavour is to remember that, at the end of the day, education, CLIL or not, must develop students’ discipline-specific productive literacy/ies. To understand what this means, we will also “be 4-year-old non-Anglophone toddlers” and experience how CLIL-instruction quite naturally develops our early maths-literacy skills, all because our family hopes to amplify our English vocabulary before we can even read.

Organizer

International Institute for Language Information (SOLIFIC)

Flyer

20241110 CLIL Workshopポスター