DAY 3

Day : 3 - 10 October 2014 (Friday)

A. Session On Employability Skills

On Day 3 of the course, the members of the London Group were greeted with a bright and chirpy “Hello” by Ms Katie Courtney Bennett, the trainer for the Employability Skills session.  Ms Bennett chose presentation skills to demonstrate to the lecturers. She focused on practising the beginning of the presentation and asking questions about information. The lecturers had also discussed their concerns about teaching employability skills and identified strategies outlined in the session that could be transferred to their own classes.

Strategies for differentiation were also accounted for.

Ms. Katie was listening to a Londoner

'welldone! I like your work ... keep it up!'

What does 344 mean?
It means the total number of years the Londoner have been teaching.
Awesome reveals

Ming : 'Ms. Katie, is my drawing good?'

Ms. Katie : 'you could draw better'

Another fun student-centered activity 

Ms. Katie : I have completed my drawing

Anna : 'would you like to build a snowman?'
Elsa : 'no Anna. I would rather watch some television programme, enjoy my karaoke session and play with my cat.'

Cameraman, are you ready??? I am going to read aloud a few sentences....make sure you get a nice shot of me."

An interesting activity was carried out with Ms. Choo as the teacher. Kindly view the short video clip below on how to conduct this exciting activity in our classroom.

B. Materials Selection and Adaptation

This very fruitful and enjoyable session was conducted with much enthusiasm by Bill Bowler.  The session covered the following questions:

1. How can we adapt and select materials for CLIL?
2. What criteria can we use for selection?
3. How can we adapt authentic materials for the CLIL classroom?

Basically, we can select authentic materials from the internet, newspapers, magazines, brochures, advertisements, etc.  We can easily choose and adapt these materials for the CLIL classroom by simplifying, improvising, paraphrasing or shortening the passages to suit the needs and proficiency level of our students based on the TASK-TEXT see-saw model.  This essentially means that when the text is difficult, the given task should be easy and when the text is simple or straightforward, the given task should be more challenging.  There should also be a variety of tasks which are progressive in nature whether in subject matter, language, cognitive demands or task demands.  In other words, we should always keep in mind that each activity should be related to the previous through topic and it should generally be more challenging than the one before.  
We should also include elements of culture in our materials.  In CLIL lessons we need to give our learners activities that allow them to communicate information about their subject in oral and written forms.  We also need to support them in the development of effective, reliable reading and listening strategies.  Last but not least, the Learning Outcomes of the tasks should be clear.

Impact / Reflection :

The hands-on activities and input given were very relevant to the participants who were able to relate them to their own preparation of materials for their lessons.  They gained a valuable insight on how to select and adapt suitable materials for their students’ needs

We should conduct an inter-polytechnic workshop for material selection and adaptation.   Participants who are teaching the same course could be grouped together to share materials and ideas.  

Written by:

Choo Mei Cheng 
Politeknik Melaka

Lee Ming Fong   
Politeknik Port Dickson