The Playing beyond CLIL (PbC) Project was an Erasmus+ Project carried out by a group of partners of universities, educational authorities and training providers for language and CLIL teachers between 2018 and 2021 bringing together drama-based pedagogy, dynamic formative assessment and Plurititeracies for Deeper Learning. It built on a previous ERASMUS+ project “Playing CLIL”. The team representing the University of Edinburgh was Professor Do Coyle, Dr Michael Lynch and Janet De Vigne.
The project participants believe Playing beyond CLIL has the potential to be inspirational and motivating for both learners and teachers, leading to deeper learning in subject knowledge and skills, linguistic progression and learner self-confidence. Playing beyond CLIL brings together new ways of pedagogic thinking which focus on alternative ways of assessing learning not only in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) contexts but beyond – relevant to ‘any age, any language and stage’ classrooms.
The PbC practices proposed are highly principled in that they are built on a range of theories. The Delphi process was used to identify key messages from relevant theories which in turn were then ‘translated’ into pedagogic principles and strategies through a process of reiteration and reflection.These are based on making visible a Pluriliteracies approach to Teaching for Deeper Learning (PTDL). This resulted in the PbC Assessment Framework and Classroom Principles which are proposed as guidance for the design of teaching and learning and the planning of learning events.
A very useful resource is the Playing beyond CLIL e-Learning platform . Amongst other things, this platform provides links to the PbC Toolkit to help teachers develop their own “Show What You Know” (SWYK) learning events, as well as a link to webinars created by the project participants.
As one of the outputs, the Edinburgh PbC Team created and ran a Webinar for students training to be Modern Languages teachers which provided an introduction to some of the key principles for Playing beyond CLIL, namely:
- Pluriliteracies
- Languaging (meaning-making)
- (Cognitive Discourse) Language Functions
- Knowledge Pathways (DOEA)
- Deeper Learning
- Process Drama i.e. interactive tasks and activities using drama and games to scaffold meaning-making
- Dynamic Assessment
The resources used in the Edinburgh webinar can be downloaded here and there are also standalone resources, which teachers can use or adapt to develop their understanding of Show What You Know, which you are encouraged to explore as you develop your own activities.
Michael Lynch, University of Edinburgh
The final report of the Playing Beyond CLIL project can be found on the ERASMUS+ website
Arnaiz Castro, P., Breidbach, S., Coyle, D., de Vigne, J., Hahl, K., & Lynch, M., 2022. Deeper Learning and Assessment in Drama-based CLIL Learning Spaces. Language Education and Multilingualism – The Langscape Journal. doi:10.18452/25444
One of the ongoing projects at the University of Glasgow is the development of an online self-reflective tool entitled ‘My Languages Profile’. This takes the form of a One Note Class Notebook administered through Glow. The intention is to create an online tool through which students can be supported to work on their own linguistic development as well as reflect on the pedagogy of teaching languages. Students can collate resources, record and evaluate their own progress as well as share and comment on each other’s ideas.
Languages are one of the eight areas of Curriculum for Excellence, and the Scottish Government remains fully committed to the 1+2 policy to enhance and extend language learning for all children and young people from early primary stages onwards. The 1 + 2 policy should be fully embedded in Scottish schools by 2021. Crichton and Valdera-Gil’s (2018) small-scale research study aimed to ascertain 38 primary teachers’ perceptions of their confidence to teach an FL to primary learners and what they felt would be helpful in developing their language proficiency and language teaching pedagogy. The teachers, while enthusiastic about the thinking behind the policy, expressed concern about their ability to provide a good model of language to their classes and their own development as learners of a language while simultaneously having to teach it. FL assistants, secondary colleagues and FL development officers were seen as valuable sources of support, but questions were raised about the sustainability of the policy without long-term permanent commitment.
Welcome to the blog pages of the SCDE Languages Group. The Group is a collaborative academic and professional network representing all Schools of Education across Scotland where there are ITE programmes. The group has been meeting for several years as an independent, supportive group of language teacher educators and researchers. Our focus has always been on sharing aspects of our core work including: how to grow, support and sustain high quality language learning and using in schools and in teacher education; using our European and international networks to carry out and be informed by research and academic/professional outputs; to address challenges of a declining take-up of languages in schools; developing strategies for changing mindsets inherent in commonly held views about language teaching and learning including the role of languages for learning; making more visible the underlying values and beliefs which drive our work; and more recently our contribution to transforming the 1 + 2 Language Policy in Scotland from an ambitious policy into purposeful classroom pedagogies. Our current emphasis is to provide relevant experiences for new entrants to the profession as well as experienced teachers in schools, so that they are better equipped to enable learners in primary school to enjoy and progress their language skills in at least two other languages. We are tasked with researching principles and practices to understand better the challenges of the rapidly changing landscape in our schools This is aspirational. The Languages Group connects and collaborates with other national government agencies and networks, providers, associations and institutes. Growing concerns about the language competence and pedagogic demands on future primary school teachers prompted the group to be seek funding from Local Authorities who wish to support our endeavours to help teachers and ultimately learners. Hence the development of this website. We not only wanted to provide guidance via a National Framework (drawing on the processes used by the group responsible for the Inclusion Framework) but we wanted to help make some of the key principles and theories about language learning, using and teaching accessible to busy teachers and student teachers in our endeavour to contribute practically to national and international contexts. Our blog will be regularly updated and will enable individual members of the group, educators and student teachers to contribute ‘think pieces’ for discussion. We hope that this will lead to meaningful and engaging discussion about the complexities and challenges of languages within and across the curriculum and beyond.