Professional development: “CLIL methodology and evaluation tools” (2020-2021)

One of the key competences in education, and more specifically in bilingual education, is evaluation: what and how to evaluate. One of the most important challenges for CLIL teachers (who teach content through English) is whether and how they should evaluate linguistic aspects. What is the relationship between language competence and knowledge in different subjects? For language teachers, on the other hand, the challenge lies in knowing how to evaluate the linguistic expression of academic content, both in their subjects and collaborating with their colleagues from other areas and levels.

To address these issues, the UAM-CLIL research group has designed a professional development seminar entitled “CLIL methodology and evaluation tools”. This is the second professional development seminar of its kind, following the success of the first seminar the year before.

The seminar offers foundations and principles that help teachers in CLIL settings to face the evaluation of linguistic competences in different subjects in a coherent way. The seminar consists of 6 monthly 2 hour sessions between November 2020 and April 2021, and addresses the following objectives:

1. Create a meeting point between content teachers and teachers of English.
2. Lay the foundations for collaboration between content and English teachers in order to gradually create holistic teaching materials which integrate subject-specific content and English as a foreign language.
3. Make teachers competent to provide students with the linguistic tools to tackle the subgenres which they encounter in their content subjects, in assignments and examinations.
4. Make teachers reflect on their evaluation criteria and practices.