Plenary Talk 1 [Bilingual]

Dr Y.L. Teresa Ting　（University of Calabria, Italy）  

Department of Chemistry & Chemical Technologies 

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Title: An Interactive Plenary on CLIL:

Why do CLIL (Education), How to do CLIL (Cognitive Neuroscience)

and What Next for CLIL (Disciplinary Literacy).

The objective of compulsory schooling is the democratization of knowledge.  As such, regardless of the profession or trade school-leavers embark on, they should be “subject-literate enough” regarding each school-discipline so to become citizens who can evaluate the verity of claims and, when unsure, acknowledge the limits of their own understandings and thus investigate further before making decisions.  This objective of “multi-disciplinary-literacy” must be central to any proposition for education, including CLIL.  However, CLIL faces additional challenges.  To start, as students “mature” from primary into secondary education and beyond, discipline-specific notions must, of course, also “mature epistemologically”.  That is why post-primary-level school subjects become increasingly more abstract, complex and challenging to comprehend, even when presented through our mother tongue.  Indeed, upper-level CLIL implicates “the learning of complex unfamiliar Content through an oftentimes not-so-familiar foreign language (FL)”.  We must therefore ensure that the presence of a FL in CLIL, rather than becoming an added burden, becomes strategized to facilitate content-comprehension.  After all, we need a cardiologist who knows content well, regardless of her (English) foreign language skills. That said, in many non-Anglophone contexts, although school-leavers have studied English as a FL for many years, they nonetheless lack the academic and discipline-specific English they need to easily navigate an international job arena.  This “interactive plenary” will illustrate how, CLIL materials for secondary-level STEM education which have been “designed with the brain in mind”, easily “strategize CLIL” to not only facilitate the learning of complex concepts but also the mastery of the complex, academic and discipline-specific English discourse that is associated with these concepts.  

Biography

Teresa Ting is a tenure-track Senior Researcher in English Applied Linguistics at the University of Calabria, Italy.  She holds Degrees in both Biology and Psychology (Muskingum, Ohio, USA) and a PhD in Neurobiology (Kent State, Ohio, USA), studying learning and memory in rodent models and teaching Functional Human Neuroanatomy to medical students. Upon moving to Italy and given the opportunity to teach English, she completed an MA-TEFL (East Anglia, UK).  Teresa’s approach to CLIL is thus grounded in a “Cognitive Neuroscience approach to STEM Education”. CLIL materials she developed received the 2013 British Council ELTons Award for Innovative Writing; she has: developed secondary-level CLIL materials for the CUP Talent Series; held leadership roles in CLIL and Education Research projects (ECML, Erasmus, COST, etc.); published in various journals (IJBEB, ELTJ, etc.).