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Playing Beyond CLIL

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