Practitioner Notes

Introduction

In the past decades, the world of education has experienced considerable changes as a result of the emergence of new technologies. A wide variety of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) and Educational Technology (EdTech) tools are currently available for teachers to maximise students’ learning experiences, and they are frequently integrated into teaching practices of different subjects. In the case of language learning, multimedia can provide learners with a sense of not only acquiring but also experiencing content, and they may lead to better understanding and retention, stimulating the students’ senses, involving them in the learning process and arising emotions, among other aspects (M., 1995, p. 350). One way of exploiting the benefits of technology is through the ICT-enrichment of textbooks, understood here as the addition of supplementary digital resources to the materials used in a specific course in order to improve the students’ learning process. For instance, (B., 2014) provides an account of the principles and procedures adopted in the creation of a set of resources to enhance English as a Foreign Language (ELF) textbooks for different stages in the Greek State.

The advantages of using technology could be especially relevant in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), which refers to subjects where learners are expected to acquire knowledge, understanding and abilities related to a content area, while also developing their skills in a foreign language that is used as a vehicle for communication (D., 1994). The double nature of these subjects implies, among other aspects, that students need to understand and work with concepts in a foreign language, using discipline-specific vocabulary (J. & T., 2014). This poses certain challenges both for content teachers, who are not usually experts in the language (C., 2011, p. 183), and for learners, who may present different cognitive and language levels (D., P., & D., 2010, p. 43). Harnessing the affordances that ICT offer could help address these problems by providing students with different forms of support in order to facilitate their comprehension of key ideas, as well as the learning of the language that they need to talk about those notions. For this reason, and in line with aforementioned previous research which has focused on the digital enhancement of general EFL textbooks, this paper presents a proposal for the ICT-enrichment of a CLIL course.

This proposal has been implemented in a CLIL course on Biology and Geology taught in a Spanish Secondary School. A needs analysis was carried out in the form of a semi-structured interview to the teacher in order to identify the challenges she faced in that particular context, and proceed to the design and selection of materials that could help address those difficulties.

Theoretical framework

CLIL: core features and challenges

The term CLIL was coined in 1994 by Marsh as referring to “situations where subjects, or parts of subjects, are taught through a foreign language with dual-focused aims, namely the learning of content and the simultaneous learning of a foreign language” D. (1994).D. (1999) regards it as a combination of four essential elements, namely content, communication, cognition and culture (see Figure 1). First, by content she refers to the knowledge, understanding and skills students need to acquire in relation to the subject-matter. Second, communication points to the need to foster the learning and use of language to interact while learning the content mentioned above, so that students improve their language proficiency at the same time. The third aspect, cognition, alludes to the development of students’ learning processes and thinking skills, which is paramount in CLIL and would involve not only lower-order thinking skills (LOTS), such as remembering, understanding or applying, but also higher-order thinking skills (HOTS), such as analysing, evaluating and creating (cf. L.W. et al., 2001 for a Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy). Finally, culture refers to the role of the CLIL classroom as an environment where students can raise their awareness of the existence of different perspectives, so that they develop their intercultural competence as global citizens (D., 1999; D. et al., 2010).

Regarding its theory of language, (J. et al., 2014) explain that CLIL is based on several main ideas (p. 120). Firstly, lexis is a key aspect in CLIL, since usually specific vocabulary is necessary to understand and express ideas about a particular subject-matter. Therefore, the learning of high-frequency words for the specific area may be essential. Secondly, grammar is seen as a tool which serves to communicate content, and thus it is sequenced according to the linguistic demands of that content. Indeed, (J. et al., 2014) emphasize as one of the main pillars of CLIL the idea that “people learn a second language more successfully when they use the language as a means of understanding content, rather than as an end in itself” (p. 118). Thirdly, texts and discourse are essential elements in CLIL, which is connected to the importance of the genres that mediate communication in a specific discipline (cf. A., T., & R., 2012, pp. 109-153). Finally, the integration of different skills takes place as it would occur in real life, and grammar is contained within those skills, rather than viewed as a separate area of language.

As for the theory of learning underlying CLIL, (J. et al., 2014) stress the importance of aspects such as comprehension, negotiation of meaning, corrective feedback and activation of previous knowledge (p. 121). The latter is particularly relevant, since, as emphasized by D., P., & D. 2010, p. 42), learners need to be encouraged to discover, process and link new information to what they already know in order to rebuild their mental schemata, which would comply with a constructivist approach. In line with this, (J. et al., 2014) explain that learners should be provided with different types of scaffolding that help them understand the content and do the tasks within, what (L.S., 1978) calls, their zone of proximal development (p. 86). Indeed, it is essential that the instructor “facilitates exposure to input at a (just) challenging level” (R., G.J., & G., 2007, p. 13, their brackets) and “(i)n CLIL contexts, teachers’ scaffolding is even more necessary as students need to process and express complex ideas in a foreign language” (A., T., & R., 2012, p. 91).

Although CLIL can be a good opportunity for the students to learn about a subject-matter and a language at the same time, it may be a difficult enterprise that requires a complex process of planning and entails certain challenges. Among these, (C., 2011) mentions the fact that the teachers of the subjects which are within a CLIL programme are not usually experts in that language, but rather in the subject-matter that is taught (p. 183), and that the amount of lessons delivered in that language tend to account for less than half of the curriculum (p. 184), which means that the amount of input may be limited. In addition, specialised vocabulary also poses difficulties for many students (E, J., & A., 2008, p. 46). Taking these aspects into consideration, the task of CLIL teachers who are not experts in the language can be facilitated by materials that enhance connections between content and language (P.,2018, p. 226).

(D. et al., 2010) also note that in many cases the learners’ language level does not equate their cognitive level (p. 43), and this mismatch between language skills and cognitive abilities can hinder effective learning. If the linguistic demands are too high in a class, students may not be able to perform well, even if they are cognitively able to do the tasks. As a result, some CLIL teachers might overuse translation to the L1 as the main means of linguistic support (C., 2019; P., 2008), resorting to it as a common practice even when it is not necessary, instead of combining it with other valid types of scaffolding that could also enable students to do the tasks while helping them to improve their language proficiency. At the same time, the activities need to be cognitively challenging at the appropriate level for language learning to take place (J. & F., 1998, p. 1). In this way, students need, on the one hand, to receive linguistic support, and on the other, to be challenged in cognitive terms, so that they can engage in “dialogic learning” (D., P., & D., 2010, p. 43). In relation to this, P., K., and J. (2015), adopting a three-dimensional perspective, recommend to always keep an adequate adjustment between conceptual, linguistic and procedural demands, as if it was a “mixing desk in a music studio” (p. 52), preventing them from being all too high at the same time so as to avoid students’ mental overload.

Research study

Proposal

Given the characteristics of CLIL and the challenges it may pose, the design of supplementary resources for the students to do at home can help mitigate those problems and facilitate the learning process. Since class time is very limited, these materials should help students review what they learn in class, providing also extra support for those who may need it and offering students the opportunity to deepen their knowledge, working both at the level of language and at the level of content.

Different modes of representation can be used to facilitate the understanding of the content. Static and dynamic pictures such as GIF files could be included to illustrate some complex ideas and clarify possible doubts students may have with the definitions of specific concepts. Likewise, videos allow them to visualise a graphic representation of the content while listening to an explanation. In this way, multimodality offers certain affordances which may be useful to overcome some of the limitations mentioned by this teacher in the interview.

It is also advisable to include resources that help students process information and work with it in a different mode or way. Subsequent encounters with key terms can be programmed in different activities where students are required to recycle and manipulate them in various ways to achieve different non-linguistic outcomes (e.g. making suggestions, classifications), which may be necessary for students to actually learn the vocabulary (I.S.P., 2001). Exercises need to try to foster the students’ learning of the target language through its use, complying with the principles of a Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach.

In the same way, the present proposal argues for the adoption of a perspective that is close to what (M., 1991) refers to as “focus on form”, which consists of paying attention to grammar items and structures as the need arises in students during the fulfillment of a task. In the case of online learning activities designed to be completed when the teacher is not present, it is essential to identify potential difficulties that could arise in each task and provide linguistic scaffolding accordingly, for instance through examples of sentences containing useful structures, making use of text enhancement, so that students can notice certain linguistic forms. Nevertheless, it is recommended that these language items are not presented as a goal in themselves for students to reach, but rather as a tool for them to be able to communicate, making their learning meaningful.

Furthermore, activities can be designed to help students develop three different types of thinking, namely convergent thinking, divergent thinking and metacognition. There can be some activities with a closed answer where students are required to find out specific data or make certain connections through a particular mental path, and the way of achieving the goal of the activity is quite restricted or predefined (e.g. multiple choice questions). These activities are useful to develop learners’ convergent thinking, which is the type of thinking “that looks for an only solution to a problem, which is the most apt, appropriate or correct one” (P., 2007, p. 138, my translation).

Other activities need to be open-ended, so that students are required to look for alternative mental paths, adopting their own way of solving a problem or carrying out a task. In this type of exercises students are not expected to give a specific answer, since there is not only one way of solving them adequately. In fact, these activities develop students’ divergent thinking, which, according to (J.P., 1967) is characterised by the fact that, unlike convergent thinking, it is used when there are not so many limitations that restrict the answer to an only possible solution (pp. 214 & 271). In this way, they contribute to fostering aspects such as creativity and problem-solving skills, which could be highly valued features in 21^stcentury citizens, since they are areas that the human brain needs to control because technology alone may not be able to cover them.

Finally, the third type of thinking, metacognition (term coined by J.H. 1976), consists of thinking about our own thinking and would include aspects such as planning, self-assessment and reflection about our own learning progress. It is fundamental to give students the opportunity to reflect on what they know and what they do not, what they would like to know about and what they have learned, as well as on their strengths and weaknesses and possible ways to improve as students in a CLIL course.

Moreover, students need to develop not only their LOTS, such as remembering, understanding different concepts and applying theory in practical exercises, but also their HOTS. It is important that they are asked to analyse, evaluate and create. Nonetheless, following (P. et al., 2015) recommendations, a balance has to be sought between linguistic, conceptual and procedural demands to try to avoid the students’ cognitive overload. For these reasons, those activities where procedural demands are higher can be presented after the concepts involved have been explained and reviewed, including at some points links to previous steps where students can go back to the basic theory before carrying out the task if they feel insecure or unable to succeed. Likewise, students can previously have the opportunity to work on the vocabulary related to those concepts, and, as has been mentioned, linguistic support can be provided in tasks to lower the linguistic demands.

In addition to content, communication and cognition, culture, which is the fourth element of Coyle’s (1999) 4Cs framework, also needs to be integrated. It is advisable to include activities that promote students’ awareness of the existence of different, equally valid points of view from which to observe certain phenomena, and the Internet, which connects people from all over the world, can be regarded as an opportunity to learn about and from other perspectives if it is used adequately.

Another key aspect is the importance of differentiation, which needs to be sought at different dimensions. First, there should be differentiation in levels, so that students can choose between different options depending on their knowledge and self-confidence with certain topics. It also has to be taken into consideration that the use of online resources gives students the opportunity to do activities at their own pace and that they can use the resources to review and revise as much as they need. Likewise, the possibility of stopping and rewinding videos offers a degree of flexibility of which both learners and teachers can take advantage, since some platforms allow the latter to keep a record of the amount of times each student has watched each fragment and get an insight into what the most difficult explanations may be for the learners, identifying in this way potential difficulties to address. Besides, the ICT-enrichment of a course can try to help not only students with a lower level either in terms of content or in terms of language, but also more advanced students, including those with high capacities. Open-ended activities where each student deepens as much as they want or can, virtual labs, investigation exercises, creative tasks and additional resources can be useful for this purpose.

Furthermore, the existence of different learning styles (N.D., 2006) needs to be taken into consideration to provide different types of materials that could help not only reading/writing learners (e.g. reading texts in digital sources, written activities), but also visual learners (e.g. videos, and graphic representations, dynamic images, mind maps), auditory learners (e.g. videos) and kinesthetic learners (e.g. interactive resources). In this way, they aim to contribute to the understanding and progress of all the students, independently of the learning style they have. Similarly, ICT-enrichment can be useful to address Gardner’s (1999) multiple intelligences through the inclusion of a wide variety of resources.

Besides, it is advisable to integrate differentiation in interests, for instance by giving students the opportunity to choose the elements on which they want to work in certain activities. This can be done with the aim of increasing the motivation, which may also be pursued by asking learners to reflect on the importance of what they learn for real life and how it relates to their immediate context. Additionally, resources such as games, experiments and investigation activities can contribute to presenting the learning path as a journey where students can review and widen their knowledge while having fun.

Finally, it is necessary that any ICT-enrichment is aligned with the corresponding legal provisions in each case. In the digital enhancement of this Spanish course on Biology and Geology in English, apart from observing the Spanish national curriculum, the design of supplementary digital materials has tried to contribute to the development of the key competences proposed by the (Commission, 2006) ² .

Platforms, tools and resources

This section will present some digital platforms, tools and resources that have been used to design activities that enrich the aforementioned CLIL course on Biology and Geology adopting the principle-based approach described above.

Curation of the resources

One aspect to consider is the curation of materials. There are different platforms that can be chosen according to the needs of each particular teacher, subject and group of students. In the case of this course on Biology and Geology, the platform selected was Moodle2, since the students used it for other subjects and were already familiar with it. This platform offers a resource called “lesson”, which allows teachers to create and curate different content in a sequence, so that one page follows the former, with the possibility of creating alternative paths for students to choose. Learners, whose progress can be tracked by the teacher, have the chance to stop doing each “lesson” at any moment, and continue working on it later from the last page they have visited. “Lessons” can include both activities created with Moodle resources and external exercises which can be embedded.

Resources to create activities involving closed answers

A series of resources have been used to create activities for students to work with vocabulary and review key disciplinary content. They allow to check comprehension and to review learning, and most of them primarily involve LOTS (e.g. understanding and remembering information), although some of them also work on HOTS (e.g. comparing and contrasting).

Moodle offers a resource called “Glossary”, which consists of a small encyclopaedia that students can be asked to generate collaboratively as they find terms that they do not understand. Each student can look for information about those words and create new entries including an image, a brief definition and any other content they may find useful, as well as keywords related to the concept. Then, each time the defined term or any of the keywords associated to it appears throughout the whole course, students can click on it and a window with this entry of the glossary will pop up. Thus, hyperlinking allows students to access different layers of knowledge immediately and solve doubts instantaneously, which may be useful in a CLIL subject.

The platform Flippity (https://www.flippity.net) has also been used to create resources that offer students the opportunity to revise with interactive flashcards (see Figure 2) containing the term and its definition, and then check their knowledge by playing different games, such as matching all the terms to their definitions by clicking on them, writing the term to which each definition refers, or finding pairs of term and definition in a memory game. This can help students to review specific vocabulary in an interactive way.

Similarly, labelling activities have been designed using the digital platform Educaplay (https://www.educaplay.com), and they ask students to identify and name important parts of specific systems or ensembles in a picture. They can help learners revise key scientific vocabulary that is needed to carry out more complex tasks. In these activities students can review the name of each section first, and then they are asked either to read a name on the top bar and click on the corresponding part of the picture, or to type in the name on each label.

Matching activities have also been created with Educaplay or with Moodle “matching” activity. This type of exercises can be used to develop students’ comparing and classifying skills, guiding their mental processes to help them make specific connections between aspects that in the book are explained on different separate pages. For instance, a brief comment or explanation about specific elements (e.g. limbs, types of skin, body temperature) and the categories they can adopt (e.g. types of limbs: wings, legs, etc.) is given at the beginning, and then learners need to classify a series of animals that are seen in different pictures according to these elements by clicking on the corresponding categories. Additionally, matching activities have been used to ask students to match a feature to its unit of measurement. Likewise, in Figure 3 there is an example of an activity which has been designed to address the problem some students have when they confuse key words such as “which” or “why”, and, accordingly, it aims for students to identify the main types of questions and the type of answer expected in each case.

In other activities which have also been created with Educaplay, students are asked to compare and contrast the features of different categories by selecting not only the aspects or elements that are exclusive of each of them, but also the ones that they have in common. When clicking on one card, the name of the category to which it pertains appears on the top bar, and the student needs to click on the rest of the cards belonging to that group (see Figure 4).

Additionally, multiple choice activities have been designed using Moodle resources to help students draw some conclusions from the information they have learned, while reviewing useful language structures in a meaningful context (see Figure 5).

Resources to create open tasks

Some activities with open answers have been designed in order to help students develop their communicative skills while connecting what they are learning to their own context and life. For instance, different authentic educational videos about specific content have been selected and adapted using the EdPuzzle platform (https://www.edpuzzle.com). This platform allows us to cut the selected videos and add comments and open questions to check students’ understanding or make them reflect about certain ideas. Likewise, it is also possible to include closed multiple choice and yes or no questions. Additionally, the teacher can keep a track of the actions made by each student, and English subtitles can be activated by the learners if necessary. Audio-visual resources can help students develop their listening skills with authentic texts and help them understand the content through the combination of audio, image and written text.

Likewise, the “essay” type of question page offered by Moodle has been used to create activities where students need to write their own answer. Learners are asked to relate key ideas to what they know about the world and process them in a different way instead of simply memorising and repeating them. This allows them to demonstrate that they really understand the information that they have learned. Some example sentences containing useful language structures can be provided as a way of scaffolding (see Figure 6).

Resources to create collaborative tasks

Different collaborative activities have been designed in order to help students work on their HOTS and develop their divergent thinking while learning from their classmates’ contributions. For instance, the platform Tricider (https://www.tricider.com) has been used to create an activity that allows students to express and share their suggestions to solve an environmental problem in written form. Then, they can evaluate the ideas proposed by their classmates by commenting on their advantages and disadvantages and voting on the ones they find more useful (see Figure 7).

Padlet (https://www.padlet.com) has been selected to design a collaborative activity where each student can contribute by sharing their discoveries about a specific mineral (see Figure 8). It allows learners to add links and upload images, audio and video files, as well as to comment on each other’s posts and give “likes” to their favourite ones.

Canva (https://www.canva.com) has been used to create a collaborative infographic for students to contribute with their own tips to save water in their everyday life (see Figure 9). The resulting composition could then be uploaded to the website of the school and shared in social networks by the learners.

Bubbl.us (https://www.bubbl.us) has been proposed as a platform for students to create a collaborative virtual mind map which provides them with a recap tool where they can review at a glance what they have learned throughout a unit (see Figure 10). Each learner can be asked to choose a type of invertebrate, locate it and write its name in the corresponding box, and then look for and select relevant features, an example and a picture, as well as any other resources they may want to include in it (e.g. links to videos or to interesting webpages). It needs to be noted that for real-time collaboration to be possible, it is necessary to subscribe to a premium plan.

Other resources

In addition to these, other resources have allowed us to incorporate different types of activities. Google Forms has been used to create questionnaires where students have to answer questions related to their learning process, which aim to raise their awareness about their own needs and goals, and help them reflect on their progress and establish new objectives and ways to achieve them. Some visible thinking routines have been adapted and integrated, as is the case of the Compass Points proposed by (Project-Zero, 2015). Through these exercises, students will be able to work on their metacognitive skills and develop their key competence of learning to learn. Moreover, these questionnaires include an additional section in which students can evaluate qualitatively the usefulness of the activities of this proposal and add any suggestions for improvement.

Google Forms has also been used to create guided lab reports for students to complete after working in virtual labs, which are digital environments available online where they can experiment, hypothesise, and apply the scientific method to discover new aspects about the topic and learn through trial and error. Guided reports help students reflect on what they have learned from the experiments and draw some conclusions in an orderly way. Similarly, questionnaires may easily be used to check the students’ understanding of specific topics in a quick way.

Likewise, interactive maps can be useful to encourage students to learn about other cultures and consider different perspectives from which to study a specific aspect. For instance, learners can explore time and seasons differences among countries as a result of rotation and revolution by clicking on different locations, and reflect on the fact that, depending on the area where people are, they tend to do different things at a specific moment of the day or of the year.

Conclusion

This proposal for the ICT-enrichment of a CLIL course tries to address the challenges that this type of subjects can pose for teachers and students. It takes into consideration relevant theoretical conceptualisations of CLIL and intends to work on the four paramount areas proposed by (D., 1999), namely content, communication, cognition and culture. In fact, it aims to help students learn and review content of the discipline, improve their communication in a foreign language both receptively and productively, develop their different cognitive skills, and become aware of the existence of other cultures and perspectives from which to approach certain concepts of the subject. All this can be sought through the inclusion of a variety of activities and resources using Moodle tools, as well as other digital platforms, making an informed use of the affordances offered by different technological elements.

The proposal is characterised by several aspects. First, it suggests that supplementary materials can include explanations of relevant concepts that are supported with different digital resources, taking advantage of hyperlinking and multimodality. At the same time, these resources need to offer a great exposure to key vocabulary items, asking students to work with them in a wide range of activities. Likewise, verbal scaffolding can be provided for students to learn the language that they need in order to convey their ideas in a variety of meaningful tasks. Moreover, the proposal argues for the creation of activities that foster the development of cognitive, divergent and metacognitive thinking, and require learners to use both their LOTS and HOTS. Furthermore, it recommends integrating differentiation in the students’ levels, their learning styles and their interests, and incorporating potentially motivating elements which may not be found in an ordinary printed textbook.

This proposal has been implemented in a CLIL course on Biology and Geology, and a natural progression of this work is to evaluate the effectiveness of the materials in the context for which they have been designed. This could be done by carrying out a study in which the learning achievement results of an experimental group to whom these resources were made available were compared with those of a control group. Subsequent interviews with the teacher would also be useful to identify improvable aspects and make any necessary modifications accordingly.

To conclude, despite its exploratory nature, this paper has explained and exemplified how ICT can be used to design a set of supplementary materials for a CLIL course with the aim of better meeting the students’ needs. It has examined existing resources and platforms available on the Internet which could be useful to support the learning process and which either are free or offer a free version, with the option of subscribing for extra features. The systematic selection, design and curation of extra digital materials from a principle-based approach could lead to a more personalised type of teaching and may help bridge some gaps related to both language and content difficulties by offering activities which each student can do at their own pace. In this way, the enriching practices used for this course could be adapted to other CLIL courses, according to the particular needs of each group of students, to maximise learning opportunities and meet the demands of these double-aimed subjects.