CLIL

What is CLIL?

       CLIL aims to introduce students to new ideas and concepts in traditional curriculum subjects (often the humanities), using the foreign language as the medium of communication - in other words, to enhance the pupils' learning experience by exploiting the synergies between the two subjects. This is often particularly rewarding where there is a direct overlap between the foreign language and the content subject.

From:http://www.cilt.org.uk/secondary/14-19/intensive_and_immersion/clil.aspx

Unit: Culture Topic: Eastern and Western Culture M.4

Unit: Food and Drink Topic: Type of Food

Writing skill

How to Improve Your Writing Skills

By Dawn Rosenberg McKay, About.com Guide

Getting your point across in writing is necessary for many jobs. Learn how to improve your writing skills.

Difficulty: Average

Time Required: na

Here's How:

1. Draw up an outline, listing each item you need to discuss in your memo, letter, or report.
2. Put items in order -- from most to least important
3. Gather information to backup what you plan to say, or to help illustrate your points
4. If appropriate, get input from others who are involved in the project you're discussing
5. Write a brief summary of your entire memo -- this will be your first paragraph.
6. Expand on each item listed in step 1, to make up the body of the memo.
7. In your last paragraph tell the recipient if he or she needs to take any action.
8. Set your document aside before proofreading it. This will allow you to look at it with a fresh eye.

Tips:

1. Avoid wordiness.
2. Write for your audience. Don't use jargon that your reader may not understand.
3. Don't rely entirely on your word processor's spell checker. It won't pick up incorrect use of a word, i.e. to vs. too vs. two.

Unit: Community Topic: Famous People M.4

Unit: Health Topic: How to keep fit M.4

Unit: Culture Topic: History of Traditional M.6

Unit: Health Topic: Sport & exercise M.6

Reading skill

Teaching Reading

Developing Reading Activities

Developing reading activities involves more than identifying a text that is "at the right level," writing a set of comprehension questions for students to answer after reading, handing out the assignment and sending students away to do it. A fully-developed reading activity supports students as readers through prereading, while-reading, and post-reading activities.
As you design reading tasks, keep in mind that complete recall of all the information in a text is an unrealistic expectation even for native speakers. Reading activities that are meant to increase communicative competence should be success oriented and build up students' confidence in their reading ability.

Construct the reading activity around a purpose that has significance for the students

Make sure students understand what the purpose for reading is: to get the main idea, obtain specific information, understand most or all of the message, enjoy a story, or decide whether or not to read more. Recognizing the purpose for reading will help students select appropriate reading strategies.

Define the activity's instructional goal and the appropriate type of response

In addition to the main purpose for reading, an activity can also have one or more instructional purposes, such as practicing or reviewing specific grammatical constructions, introducing new vocabulary, or familiarizing students with the typical structure of a certain type of text.

Check the level of difficulty of the text

The factors listed below can help you judge the relative ease or difficulty of a reading text for a particular purpose and a particular group of students.

• How is the information organized? Does the story line, narrative, or instruction conform to familiar expectations? Texts in which the events are presented in natural chronological order, which have an informative title, and which present the information following an obvious organization (main ideas first, details and examples second) are easier to follow.
• How familiar are the students with the topic? Remember that misapplication of background knowledge due to cultural differences can create major comprehension difficulties.
• Does the text contain redundancy? At the lower levels of proficiency, listeners may find short, simple messages easier to process, but students with higher proficiency benefit from the natural redundancy of authentic language.
• Does the text offer visual support to aid in reading comprehension? Visual aids such as photographs, maps, and diagrams help students preview the content of the text, guess the meanings of unknown words, and check comprehension while reading.

Remember that the level of difficulty of a text is not the same as the level of difficulty of a reading task. Students who lack the vocabulary to identify all of the items on a menu can still determine whether the restaurant serves steak and whether they can afford to order one.

Use pre-reading activities to prepare students for reading

The activities you use during pre-reading may serve as preparation in several ways. During pre-reading you may:

• Assess students' background knowledge of the topic and linguistic content of the text
• Give students the background knowledge necessary for comprehension of the text, or activate the existing knowledge that the students possess
• Clarify any cultural information which may be necessary to comprehend the passage
• Make students aware of the type of text they will be reading and the purpose(s) for reading
• Provide opportunities for group or collaborative work and for class discussion activities

Sample pre-reading activities:

• Using the title, subtitles, and divisions within the text to predict content and organization or sequence of information
• Looking at pictures, maps, diagrams, or graphs and their captions
• Talking about the author's background, writing style, and usual topics
• Skimming to find the theme or main idea and eliciting related prior knowledge
• Reviewing vocabulary or grammatical structures
• Reading over the comprehension questions to focus attention on finding that information while reading
• Constructing semantic webs (a graphic arrangement of concepts or words showing how they are related)
• Doing guided practice with guessing meaning from context or checking comprehension while reading

Pre-reading activities are most important at lower levels of language proficiency and at earlier stages of reading instruction. As students become more proficient at using reading strategies, you will be able to reduce the amount of guided pre-reading and allow students to do these activities themselves.

Match while-reading activities to the purpose for reading

In while-reading activities, students check their comprehension as they read. The purpose for reading determines the appropriate type and level of comprehension.

• When reading for specific information, students need to ask themselves, have I obtained the information I was looking for?
• When reading for pleasure, students need to ask themselves, Do I understand the story line/sequence of ideas well enough to enjoy reading this?
• When reading for thorough understanding (intensive reading), students need to ask themselves, Do I understand each main idea and how the author supports it? Does what I'm reading agree with my predictions, and, if not, how does it differ? To check comprehension in this situation, students may
• Stop at the end of each section to review and check their predictions, restate the main idea and summarize the section
• Use the comprehension questions as guides to the text, stopping to answer them as they read

From:http://www.nclrc.org/essentials/reading/developread.htm


Unit: Culture Topic: Local Fable M.2 (Part1)
Unit: Culture Topic: Local Fable M.2 (Part2)
Unit: Culture Topic: Local Fable M.2 (Part3)

Unit: Science and Technology Topic: Energy sources M.5

Unit: Foreign Culture Topic: Local Wisdom Sub-topic: Belief M.2

Unit: Myself Topic: Self Image P.6 (Part1)
Unit: Myself Topic: Self Image P.6 (Part2)
Unit: Myself Topic: Self Image P.6 (Part3)
Unit: Myself Topic: Self Image P.6 (Part4)

Unit: Personal Relationship Topic: Appearances M.3

Unit: Culture Topic: Local Stories M.3

Unit: Science and Technology Topic: Energy sources M. 5

Speaking skill

Teaching Speaking

 Goals and Techniques for Teaching Speaking

The goal of teaching speaking skills is communicative efficiency. Learners should be able to make themselves understood, using their current proficiency to the fullest. They should try to avoid confusion in the message due to faulty pronunciation, grammar, or vocabulary, and to observe the social and cultural rules that apply in each communication situation.
To help students develop communicative efficiency in speaking, instructors can use a balanced activities approach that combines language input, structured output, and communicative output.
Language input comes in the form of teacher talk, listening activities, reading passages, and the language heard and read outside of class. It gives learners the material they need to begin producing language themselves.
Language input may be content oriented or form oriented.

• Content-oriented input focuses on information, whether it is a simple weather report or an extended lecture on an academic topic. Content-oriented input may also include descriptions of learning strategies and examples of their use.
• Form-oriented input focuses on ways of using the language: guidance from the teacher or another source on vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar (linguistic competence); appropriate things to say in specific contexts (discourse competence); expectations for rate of speech, pause length, turn-taking, and other social aspects of language use (sociolinguistic competence); and explicit instruction in phrases to use to ask for clarification and repair miscommunication (strategic competence).

In the presentation part of a lesson, an instructor combines content-oriented and form-oriented input. The amount of input that is actually provided in the target language depends on students' listening proficiency and also on the situation. For students at lower levels, or in situations where a quick explanation on a grammar topic is needed, an explanation in English may be more appropriate than one in the target language.
For more on input, see Guidelines for Instruction.

Structured output focuses on correct form. In structured output, students may have options for responses, but all of the options require them to use the specific form or structure that the teacher has just introduced.

Structured output is designed to make learners comfortable producing specific language items recently introduced, sometimes in combination with previously learned items. Instructors often use structured output exercises as a transition between the presentation stage and the practice stage of a lesson plan. textbook exercises also often make good structured output practice activities.

In communicative output, the learners' main purpose is to complete a task, such as obtaining information, developing a travel plan, or creating a video. To complete the task, they may use the language that the instructor has just presented, but they also may draw on any other vocabulary, grammar, and communication strategies that they know. In communicative output activities, the criterion of success is whether the learner gets the message across. Accuracy is not a consideration unless the lack of it interferes with the message.

In everyday communication, spoken exchanges take place because there is some sort of information gap between the participants. Communicative output activities involve a similar real information gap. In order to complete the task, students must reduce or eliminate the information gap. In these activities, language is a tool, not an end in itself.
In a balanced activities approach, the teacher uses a variety of activities from these different categories of input and output. Learners at all proficiency levels, including beginners, benefit from this variety; it is more motivating, and it is also more likely to result in effective language learning.

From:http://vietnamfreelancer.info/images/public%20speaker.jpg
Picture


Unit: Myself Topic: Personal Information P.6

Unit: Shopping Topic: Supermarket M.3

Listening skill

Teaching Listening

Listening is the language modality that is used most frequently. It has been estimated that adults spend almost half their communication time listening, and students may receive as much as 90% of their in-school information through listening to instructors and to one another. Often, however, language learners do not recognize the level of effort that goes into developing listening ability.

Far from passively receiving and recording aural input, listeners actively involve themselves in the interpretation of what they hear, bringing their own background knowledge and linguistic knowledge to bear on the information contained in the aural text. Not all listening is the same; casual greetings, for example, require a different sort of listening capability than do academic lectures. Language learning requires intentional listening that employs strategies for identifying sounds and making meaning from them.

Listening involves a sender (a person, radio, television), a message, and a receiver (the listener). Listeners often must process messages as they come, even if they are still processing what they have just heard, without backtracking or looking ahead. In addition, listeners must cope with the sender's choice of vocabulary, structure, and rate of delivery. The complexity of the listening process is magnified in second language contexts, where the receiver also has incomplete control of the language.

Given the importance of listening in language learning and teaching, it is essential for language teachers to help their students become effective listeners. In the communicative approach to language teaching, this means modeling listening strategies and providing listening practice in authentic situations: those that learners are likely to encounter when they use the language outside the classroom.

From:http://www.nclrc.org/essentials/listening/liindex.htm

Unit: Places Topic: Tourist Attraction M.3

Unit: Culture Topic: Local History M.5 (Part1)
Unit: Culture Topic: Local History M.5 (Part2)

Unit: Environment Topic: Environment protection M.6

Unit: Environment Topic: How to preserve the environment M.4

PPP Model

Unit: Travel Topic: Direction P.5

Unit: Travel Topic: Direction P.6 (Part1)
Unit: Travel Topic: Direction P.6 (Part2)

Unit: Culture Topic: Local Wisdom Sub-topic: Proverbs P.5 (Part1)
Unit: Culture Topic: Local Wisdom Sub-topic: Proverbs P.5 (Part2)
Unit: Culture Topic: Local Wisdom Sub-topic: Proverbs P.5 (Part3)

Unit: Shopping Topic: price P.5 (Part1) 
Unit: Shopping Topic: price P.5 (Part2) 
Unit: Shopping Topic: price P.5 (Part3)

B-Slim Model

What are the goals of the B-SLIM model?

1. to develop self directed learners, especially in second languages

2. to ensure that every learner succeeds at each phase of the learning process by maximizing exposure to concepts through all learning styles/intelligences and encouraging intellectual/thinking growth in systematically developed steps

3. to help students develop all aspects of language by applying research findings from all areas of second language learning and acquisition (language awareness, pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, situations- fluency-accuracy, culture and Culture, learning strategies, listening comprehension, speaking, writing, reading, forms, skills, content, motivation-attitude)

4. to ensure that learners can transfer what they have learned in one familiar context to new contexts.

5. to learn language and to learn through language.

6. to identify success in learning in concrete provable terms (assessment for learning and assessment of learning).

B-Slim overview

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Unit: Free time Topic: Sport P.6

Unit: Health Topic: Food groups M.5

Unit places Topic direction M.1

Unit: Place Topic:Interesting Place in Community Sub Topic: Directions M.1

Unit: Tourism Topic: Travel arrangment M.5

Unit: Personal Relationship Topic: Personal Traits M.4

Unit: Health Topic: How to keep fit M.4

Unit: Education & Careers Topic :Future & Career M.5