A School Garden Project. A Planned CLIL Unit

Lesson Plan from the year 2022 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Miscellaneous, grade: 1,3, Martin Luther University (Institut für Schulpädagogik und Grundschuldidaktik), course: Content and Language Integrated Learning in the Classroom, language: English, abstract: One of the main characteristics of CLIL is that students learn about content e.g. science, ethics or physical educationand through an additional language other than their mother tongue. When it comes to evaluate the potential of CLIL, the pros and also the challenges of teaching content and language at the same time have to be considered. Therefore, it should also be differentiated that there are differences between Hard CLIL and Soft CLIL. Hard CLIL focuses on the main goal of acquisition of subject knowledge. It is taught by a teacher of this specific subject who has to follow the curriculum. Other than that, Soft CLIL puts emphasis on language benefits and takes up parts of the curriculum of a subject only. There, the teacher of a foreign language holds the lesson or units. During our seminar, we focused on Soft CLIL but there is still a lack of already prepared and tested material for both types of CLIL. The choice of which CLIL is implemented often depends on several factors like teacher availability, amount of time, the capacity to implement CLIL in general, networking etc.13 It is obvious that there has to be thoughtful planning before implementing CLIL in schools. But not only before implementing CLIL in the classrooms but also while preparing specific units there has to be thoughtful planning as well because there is a lot to convey in CLIL lessons e.g the vocabulary and basic skills like reading, listening, writing, speaking as well as the subject content. To plan a good lesson, the teacher has to be and has to prepare much material using e.g. scaffolding and glossaries. This fact can cause time problems for the teacher. Apart from that a challenging factor could be the overload of subject input. Some students struggle with language issues and therefore could have problems to process the content in the appropriate depth. That makes it necessary to very closely supervise the process but this, depending on the number of students, can sometimes be quite challenging. The teacher has to provide a range of necessary vocabulary with subject terminology to make sure the students are able to follow the content.