Fostering Personalized Learning through CLIL in 8th Grade Biology at San Bonifacio de las Lanzas School

Abstract

Bilingual education in Colombia has been expanding over the years in response to the advantages on a global scale of mastering this lingua franca. However, attending a bilingual school does not guarantee a fully bilingual individual who comprehends and produces English at a native or near native like level. Students need to embrace language learning which requires great learner autonomy and motivation. This intervention proposal is designed to use the motivation that students have for their content areas to improve language learning. We propose the implementation of content and language integrated learning (CLIL ) and personalized learning in 8th grade Biology in order to support language, improve student use of BICS and CALP and improve overall English levels. We provide the theoretical background on which the proposal is based. First with CLIL, its driving principles, core features and CLIL teacher competences are examined. Next we explore scaffolding and useful strategies for classroom use and finally present research on personalized learning and how it relates to CLIL. The proposal incorporates data collected from students and teachers which give insight into the attitudes that affect language learning and language teaching respectively. It aims to identify the practices that the school has in common with the CLIL approach and use these to provide a connection to new ones. Training sessions are designed to be carried out with both Biology and English teachers in order to have a language perspective and to have more complete information on the students which would aid in the application of personalized learning strategies. This is followed by a planning session to produce a CLIL lesson adapting an existing lesson plan. Finally, we look at the limitations of this proposal and the need to extend the proposal to other content areas and create a culture of personalization so students can adapt to this new autonomous way of working.