Teaching a content area through a foreign language brings many challenges in addition to those typically faced by traditional language teachers. How can we plan our classes so that both the content and language objectives are adequately met? What resources are out there? How can we scaffold our pupils’ understanding of both the language and the content area? With CLIL programmes steadily increasing all over the country, the need to address these and other bread-and-butter issues central to the reality of the classroom provided the theme for the first Primary CLIL (PCLIL) National Conference in Madrid last November.

The conference was one of the fruits of a three-year Comenius 2.1 project which started in 2006 and is due to finish in September 2009. As well as creating the only Europe-wide online and face-to-face CLIL teacher training package, the six partners from four European countries offered teachers in Spain an opportunity to hear six different speakers presenting sessions on a variety of practical topics.

Well known US-based author and educational consultant Mary Lou McCloskey proved to be a popular choice of speaker, drawing a bumper crowd for her plenary session on the Activity-Based Communicative (ABC) model which is designed to integrate oral and written language skills into any content area. Gabriela Kleckova, a partner in the project from the Czech Republic, added to the international flavour of the conference and joined both Mary Lou McCloskey and Macmillan’s own in-house trainer Gail Butler for workshops respectively on scaffolding techniques and planning strategies. Angela Cofiño and Maria Franco shared the results of the work which won them both prestigious European Label for Innovation awards and popular Macmillan author Joanne Ramsden showed just how much fun a discovery-based approach to science can be with the right choice of songs, games and experiments.

The event, held at the Universidad CEU San Pablo in Madrid, was attended by over 200 teachers from as far afield as Barcelona and A Coruña. The feedback from attendees reflected the both high quality and practical nature of the sessions and the impressive calibre of the speakers.

You can keep up to date with the latest PCLIL developments by visiting the project’s website: http://pclil.cbtl.eu/moodle/login/index.php

Macmillan Teacher Training Department