CLIL as an Inclusive Approach. A design of a CLIL Rubric to evaluate Students with the Asperger Syndrome

Abstract

Inclusive Education is a worldwide system where students are given the opportunity and support to learn together in the same classroom. In Ecuador, it responds to the guarantee of the right to a quality education, of all children, adolescents, youth and adults in the education system, at all levels and modalities; recognizing the diversity, as established in Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution about the "RIGHTS OF GOOD LIVING" (Derechos del “Buen Vivir”). This study presents a research done around how Asperger students may be evaluated in terms of fairness to their condition facing their peers, and of complete consideration to their innate abilities to gain knowledge within the subject of Literature through a standard rubric. The first stand of studies has focused on the theoretical framework to comprehend how inclusion is working in education, and how special needs as Asperger are being considered under the local laws for the effect, and from praxis in the daily planning and application of teachers. It also includes an overview of CLIL as an inclusive approach that is the base for our study. The second stand of studies presents literature around assessment through rubrics. This part of the research deepens on how assessment works in CLIL; how the characteristics of assessment in CLIL align with the thesis of inclusion to be adapted to students with special needs, more specifically talking about Asperger students. In addition, there is literature about rubrics to finally propose a standard rubric that comprises criteria and descriptors that make viable an accurate evaluation to Asperger students within the subject of Literature for the tenth grade in secondary school. So as for an overall view, the education system in Ecuador aims to be an active entity of inclusive education like most of the world. Since English is the lingua franca, Ecuador has adopted it in the same way as the majority of countries around the world have done and also the mandate to include students with special educational needs in regular schools. For these, it can be concluded with great firmness that CLIL is the methodology that meets all the requirements to foster a high quality bilingual education and a powerful gear in attention to diversity, which allows to directly target students with special educational needs through a second language, and an integral education through all the different techniques that encloses, and the personalized and differentiated assessment that it allows.