Pixel International Conferences

Recent language curriculum reforms in the Italian education policy have focused on CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) methodology with great emphasis on the active collaboration between language and content teachers to foster students’ communication and transversal competencies. However, in many schools, the shortage of qualified subject-area teachers with CLIL prerequisites has frequently impeded the innovation required by the Ministry, thus calling for more training on content and language goals. Convinced of the advantages of CLIL programming and supported by school administrators versed in such methodology, it was agreed that a multi-faceted approach was needed which used all the resources and competencies we had at our disposal.
This study aims at presenting a two years’ vertical project involving students from different school grades engaged in interdisciplinary CLIL activities as protagonists of their learning. Senior students of a scientific high school in the province of Milan became content-instructors of junior mentees who, in turn, taught last-year students from nearby middle schools after some disciplinary topics (Art, History, Science, Technology, Social Studies) had been vertically and mutually agreed with the students who played the role of novice educators. Constant monitoring and supervision were assured in the different phases of the project by both language and content teachers who cooperated as facilitators and in a certain sense as learners, too.
By swapping roles our objectives were both linguistic and pedagogical since we wanted to investigate how students’ attitudes towards English learning and communication could improve in this new and reversed CLIL environment. To achieve our aims both quantitative analyses and questionnaires were adopted which all valued the vertical implementation as a powerful way of promoting motivation and interaction. Our results also proved that being lectured by peers was beneficial to boost students’ speaking skills at all levels and to learn contents more effectively.

Keywords: CLIL, Communication, Speaking, Peer Teaching, Motivation;