Pixel International Conferences

This study describes an innovative CLIL action-research model which has been set up during the COVID-19 lockdown with a group of 9th-grade students of a scientific high school in Lodi (city notoriously famous for being one of the first COVID-19 epicenters in Italy). Its aim is to pedagogically improve the quality of distance education and to bring about learning improvements in both Math contents and the English language by exploiting the metric-imperial system conversions and using them to "measure the COVID experience". Outcomes also include significant advancements in the students’ digital competence, new attitudes to scientific learning, cultural awareness, and critical thinking skills. To achieve these results, an action research approach has been followed. This has included an initial reflection on the remote teaching problem, setting research questions and objectives, planning, and selecting appropriate strategies for improvement, identifying signs of success, and monitoring progress. This study examines how the union of an action-research model with two CLIL task-based projects (focused on metric-imperial unit-conversions of temperature, length, width, mass, volume, and weight) not only has resulted in noteworthy advancements in contents, cognition, and communication but has also had a beneficial impact on the remote teaching modality and its implementation as a pioneering and revolutionary approach during the pandemic. Additionally, quantitative analyses and questionnaires have also proved how this approach is a powerful way of promoting motivation and interaction even in an online learning setting.

Keywords: CLIL, action-research, distant teaching, task-based learning.

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