FOURTH DAY 13 OCTOBER 2014

OVERVIEW BY ABANG MUAMMAR GHADDAFI 

The morning session started off with an “English Language Class on Employability Skills” by Chris. We learned about different gestures and opening presentation skills.The second session was about “Learning Skills across the curriculum” with Carole. We learned about active learning that involves exploring, interacting and applying in contexts. We were also exposed to learning skills that is knowing about different ways to learn and how to develop learner autonomy and students’ need to develop learning strategies. The last session was “Language Across The Curriculum” by Chris. For this session we learned how important for learners to be familiar and understand grammatical structures, vocabulary and functional language or content-obligatory language. Learners also need to know general or everyday English to describe, explain and link ideas which are called content-compatible language. 

All three sessions were very crucial and useful to be applied in the teaching of English in my Vocational College. The employability skills introduced in the English language class was really good and relevant to what I teach in Vocational College during the short semester. Learning skills were eye opening as they are considered important to cater when we plan our lesson. Language does play an important role when used across the curriculum and it must be used correctly in order to convey clear and exact information to others.


SLOT 2 - OVERVIEW BY AZIZAH MAT YASIN 

Carole Allsop

The second session of today's training was about 'Learning Skills Across The Curriculum' by Carole Allsop. The session was really fruitful as we were enlighten with numerous useful learning skills (different ways of learning that could develop learner autonomy) that can be used in CLIL classroom. The need to produce active learning is very crucial for both learners' short-term and long-term retention of information.

 Learners learn best when they are exposed to 'desirable difficulties' (challenging tasks). Challenging learners through demanding tasks ascertain long-term learning and retention. Assigning easy tasks, on the other hands, only provide learners with 'illusions' (make learners 'feel' they understand what they have learned when are actually no). Easy tasks are not able to retain learners long-term performance as they would take for granted on what they have acquired. 

Apart from providing learners with 'desirable difficulties', learners also would learn best when regular practices of what have been taught are carried out over several smaller blocks rather than just cramming them in one single block (spaced learning). Thus, to encourage better learning, it is always good for us (lecturers) to plan our lesson well by considering the types of task and time we offer our students with. 

  

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SLOT 3- OVERVIEW BY NORDIYANA BINTI MOHD RANI

It is already our 4th day here at Balik Pulau Polytechnic. Today, we had two slots with Chris and what I am going to share with you here is the lesson that we had for the afternoon slot. The topic that we had discussed was ‘Language across the Curriculum’.

The class started with us playing a game called CLIL Bingo where we were given eight statements which we had to guess and match them with a list of sentence structures. The game was quite fun and enjoyable. On the first attempt, we did miss some of the statements but eventually we were able to pair all of them correctly. 

Throughout the slot,we were able to figure out that when learning a language, learners find it most difficult with the features of language for instance spelling, forms and functions, as well as vocabulary. One of the aspects of language that learners always struggle with is the language structures especially the grammar element for example the subject-verb agreement.

By doing a discussion with group members, we had come up with a few ways on how we can help the students who have to face with such challenges. One of those is we shall correct them when they are giving their feedback so they will know right away which part of sentence they might have done wrong. 

Image taken here

All in all, we know that CLIL subjects take up a variety of language items and to overcome learners’ difficulty in adapting with those, we as lecturers can put ourselves in their shoes and be aware of our own language issues so that we would understand more the struggle that they are facing in learning a language.

 Pen off- Oxford