CLIL Experience in Italian Middle School

Daniela Villani

Daniela Villani has been teaching English in Italian schools for 26 years and she is currently teaching at Scuola Media "G. Cassano" in Trecate. She is co-author of various English books for Primary and Secondary School, among others LIVE, a textbook for Scuola Media published by ATLAS Bergamo in 2004. She is a freelance teacher trainer and the local coordinator of LEND - Lingue e Nuova Didattica. She has produced materials for the INDIRE e-learning programme and has written articles which have been published in language magazines like English Teaching Forum and Lingue e Nuova Didattica.
E-mail: borando@libero.it

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Introduction
Step 1: Introducing the topic
Step 2: Getting the essential information
Step 3: Art work and descriptions
Step 4: The insect exhibition
A parallel activity
Good points of the CLIL experience
Conclusions
References

This is a short article that one of my students, 12-year-old Giada Marchetti, wrote for the school magazine in June last year about the CLIL project I had carried out for a whole school year together with my maths colleague Luigina Vacchini. We were lucky enough to have an hour co-teaching a week in that class. Besides, Luigina speaks quite good English and was ready to experiment with something new - as was I. Our students perceived it as "a new subject", but not a boring subject, rather a fun activity and something to be proud of: using English to talk, read and write about scientific topics, probably something they had never even thought about. In this article I would like to illustrate in some detail our science project about insects.

First of all we illustrated the project to the class and had a quick brainstorming on the topic "Insects". A lot of different kinds of insects were suggested by the students, mostly in Italian. I gave them the equivalents of their names in English, which they wrote in their notebooks. Incidentally, also spiders were mentioned, but Luigina pointed out that spiders are often confused with insects but they are actually a separate group called arachnids - she explained all this to us in English. In this phase we, the teachers, also elicited whatever previous knowledge they had on the subject and even the feelings they had towards insects. This gave me the possibility to introduce or revise such expressions such as I'm scared of…, I hate…, I think they're nice. / annoying / disgusting, etc.

We gave each student a photocopy of the introductory page of the book called Children's Guide to Insects and Spiders with short and clear presentations of the main characteristics of insects, together with a big picture of a typical insect with labels carrying the names of the various parts of its body. Along with this page we gave them a list of questions to help focus their attention on the text and facilitate comprehension of the main points (ex.: Which are the three parts of an insect's body? How many legs do insects have?... ).

The students read the text and answered the questions in groups. A dictionary was provided for each group, but they did not have to use it very often - in fact, they were already familiar with a lot of key words (legs, head, body…). Besides, they noticed that some words were either the same or very similar to their Italian equivalents (ex.: antennae, abdomen, thorax, mandible…). Of course, we monitored the groups and gave any kind of help they needed. In the end, we tried to summarize some basic information on the topic, which was written on the board and everyone copied in their notebooks. We did this in an open discussion where everybody was free to express what they had learnt either in L1 or L2. The notions which were referred in L1 were translated into L2 by me or Luigina. Here are some of the main ideas which came from the class:

- Insects are the largest group of animals in the world - there are over one million species. - Most insects are small - or very small. - They have colonized every type of habitat. - All insects have certain common features. - Some insects are harmful for men (they eat crops, carry disease, sting and bite us…) - They also do a lot of good (they are the most important pollinators of plants, provide food for a lot of other creatures, give us products like wax, honey, silk, etc).

We examined the list of contents of the book Children's Guide to Insects and Spiders and saw that it was divided into seven chapters (excluding the one about spiders and scorpions). Each chapter dealt with a 'family' of insects sharing the same characteristics (ex.: Bugs, lice and fleas - Butterflies and moths - Beetles - Flies….). We asked the students which chapter they preferred to examine and divided the class into groups according to their choices, as much as was possible. Then we gave each group photocopies of the chapter they had chosen plus more photocopies from the book Creepy Crawlies, which has superb XL pictures.
In this phase we asked them to:
1. write about the main characteristics of that particular 'family' of insects
2. draw and colour, on separate sheets, at least three of the insects catalogued, write their names and a caption with a short description of them.
Which the students did -and enjoyed doing, in the course of the next three classes.

When all the groups had finished their assignments, they brought coloured cardboard sheets to school and pasted their drawings and captions onto them. The posters were displayed on the classroom walls. Students from a parallel class were invited to see the insect exhibition in our class and each group briefly explained to the visitors what insects they had on their posters, what family they belonged to, etc. - in English, of course!

Talking about butterflies, we came across the theme of life cycles and metamorphosis, which they all knew about from primary school. We read something from the book Cycles, Cycles, Cycles, which has very nice illustrations, and then I read them a short story which I particularly like: The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. I read the story out aloud and they all loved it. A group even decided to illustrate the story, others learnt parts of it by heart. It was a good moment, an escape from the world of science into the literary world, which are not so far away from each other after all!

- This was an open-ended activity. In fact, some students who worked quickly and enjoyed drawing produced more than one insect I.D. and in some cases the results were excellent- even the art teacher was very pleased.
- The activity allowed for different learning styles and working modes. In a few groups, one student did all the art work while the others took care of the reading and writing; in other groups each student "adopted" a different insect, drew it, read and wrote about it. We didn't intervene in the group decisions, letting them work the way they had chosen.
- A lot of English was used all along the activity - I wouldn't say that only interaction in English took place -( Far from it!), but certainly there was a good deal of it.
- Reading skills were practised intensively. The students were faced with the task to find out the main ideas in a text - and had to find strategies to cope with it (using a bilingual dictionary, resorting to words which are similar to Italian, guessing the meaning from the context and/or from their own general knowledge).
- A lot of new vocabulary was covered and some vocabulary was revised. The activity also provided an opportunity for the students to reflect on compound nouns like grasshopper, honeybee, sting less bee and similar words (the texts provided innumerable examples).
- A lot of language structures were introduced or revised, for ex. the superlative form of adjectives, present tense for habits, verb to have, WH- questions referring to sizes, places, etc.
- When they examined the American books they came across some cultural references, which they were curious about. For example, the insect size was given in the following way: 'up to 1 in long' or 'wingspan 11 in'. Of course they wanted to know what 'in' meant, which I made clear by asking them to look at their rulers - they had centimetres on one side and inches on the other - many of them had never noticed! So they decided to convert the inches into millimetres or centimetres and use the metric measurements in their own captions - which was good mathematical task, considering that many sizes were expressed in fractions of inches (here Luigina had to give some assistance!). Some students who were particularly interested in this did some more research on the Imperial System and found out about ounces, pints, miles, etc., which they told about the rest of the class.
- From the captions in the books they also noticed that the name of the family of insects was given in Latin and this gave us the opportunity to reflect on the importance of this language for the scientific world, in particular for zoology and botany.

In conclusion, I can say it was quite a rewarding activity, both for us teachers and for our students, as proves the feedback given in the article above. The students learnt something new, practiced the English language in meaningful contexts, worked in groups with a specific aim, and finally shared the product of their work with others.

Johnson J., (1996), Children's Guide to Insects and Spiders, Simon § Schuster, New York Johnson J., (1995), Creepy Crawlies - A Closer Look at the World's Tiny Creatures, Riverswift, London Carle E., (1969), The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Philomel Books Ross M. E., (1979), Bug Life Cycle in Cycles, Cycles, Cycles, published by Yosemite Natural History Association Marchetti G., Una Nuova Materia: Scienze e Matematica in Inglese, PiccolaMediaGrande, School Magazine of the Scuola Media G. Cassano Trecate, year 9, issue 1, page 8