One Year of CLIL

Adapting MEXT Approved Textbooks for CLIL in Senior High

As a teacher who has found CLIL useful in answering questions raised and solving problems confronted in my own teaching practice, I have attempted to use CLIL not only in courses where it seemed a natural option, but also in courses where it would seem to be a challenge, namely in traditional senior high EFL classes using MEXT approved textbooks. In this talk, I will discuss realizations and techniques which have allowed me to use CLIL throughout a school year. I will argue that by conceptualizing content as not just information traditionally related to a particular subject, but as the set of concepts, skills, and methods of analysis as well, any text can be used in a CLIL classroom. However, these textbooks were not designed with this goal in mind. I will discuss three techniques to help fill in the gap, which I call concept mining, the framing technique, and the defining technique. In short, concept mining is the practice of finding a concept linked, explicitly or otherwise, to the text; framing uses a concept to view or analyze the text; defining uses the text to build understanding of the concept. I will present examples of these techniques with materials from various units used in a senior high school EFL class. Hopefully, this discussion of my own practice will be of use to teachers, teacher trainers, and materials designers.

Matthew Davis graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2009 with a B.A. in International Affairs and Japanese. Following half a year spent at a small NGO in Washington D.C., he came to Japan as Princeton in Asia fellow and began working at Notre Dame Seishin Girls Junior and Senior High School from 2010 until 2018. During that time, he also completed his M.A. in English Education at Okayama University. From April of 2018, Matthew has begun working as an employee of Okayama prefecture at Okayama Daianji Secondary School. While his main focus is CLIL, as a former debater, Matthew is also active in promoting debate activities and developing ways to implement debate activities effectively in the classroom.

Room L-821 Yotsuya Campus,Sophia University