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Teaching Primary through Cross-Curricular Content

There has been increasing attention paid over the last few years to CLIL in Primary (Content based learning). CLIL states that we should teach content (science, maths, history, geography), as a way to teach English. This increasing interest in CLIL has gone hand in hand with an increasing awareness that at primary level, students benefit much more from rich linguistic input and acquisition, rather than an explicit focus on form. That means we study less grammar (or no grammar), just provide lots of interesting materials for students to study.

An extension of CLIL, is bilingual education, where we teach whole subjects in English. There is a lot of debate about whether we should in fact teach subjects in English and there are conflicting research findings in this area. If you don’t want to commit to teaching a whole other subject in English, one good compromise may be not to teach whole subjects in English, but rather to teach topics in English that you can relate to different subject areas.

So we know that CLIL is interesting in terms of improving learner’s English, and we know that we can teach CLIL through topics, but how do we transform this into action? Many of us work in institutions where we don’t have enough resources to buy specific CLIL material, so does that mean we can’t use CLIL? 

Making a Topic Web

One way to make content based materials is through a Topic Web. A Topic Web can help you work with any subject you want, from maths and science to poetry and drama. You can also concentrate on Whole Teaching approaches by looking at values through your Topic Web.

Here are some steps you may want to follow to help you with making a Topic Web, taken from the Cambridge Teacher Training and Development Book, Teaching Children English:

  • Draw up a checklist of language points that you wish your language course to cover;
  • Match this checklist to the language points that are generated through the activities  suggested in the topic webs;
  • Add/adapt activities so that both checklists cover more or less the same language points.

NB: See a sample topic web in the primary teaching newsletter, page 3.
 

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