Content and Language Integrated Learning Methodology in Optional Humanities Courses for First-Year University Students: A Case Study

Abstract

The article analyzes using Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) for teaching one of the optional humanities disciplines to Ukrainian university students of different majors. The discipline discussed in the article as an example of using CLIL methodology is “The Fundamentals of Psychology and Pedagogy” and it is in the list of optional humanities subjects for the first-year students of Alfred Nobel University in Dnipro, Ukraine. However, unlike the other optional humanities disciplines, the methodology underlying this course is based on teaching the subject in English, instead of Ukrainian, following the CLIL approach widely used in the European education but still little known in Ukraine. The purpose of the paper is to expose and analyze the original methodology developed that conditioned the specific structure of the relevant course, and the specific learning activities used in it. The essence of the developed CLIL theory-based methodology and its practical application are manifested through learning activities that include students’ mini-lectures/workshop-type presentations, brainstorming, case-studies, discussions, and a learning project with its results summarized in students’ essays, abstracts, and summaries written in English. The students collect the information required for completing their tasks not only from the teacher’s lectures and the recommended literature but also (and mostly) by way of doing extensive Internet-search on psychological and pedagogical sites in English. All this makes CLIL in the case under discussion experiential-interactive (through personal experience in extra-linguistic subject-related activities gained in interaction with other students), blended (with the organic combination of traditional in-class learning and out-of-class online information search), autonomous (students’ autonomous learning activities-centered), and cooperative (with those activities being done in students’ cooperative interaction). As the result, students mostly self-construct their knowledge of the discipline by way of using the target language as the tool for such self-construction. This makes the elaborated course a clear-cut case of constructivism in CLIL pedagogy. Subject Classification Numbers: PACS 01.40.-d (Education)