Learning to plan for CLIL with the Reading to Learn approach. An experience in initial teacher training.

Abstract

This article describes an innovational educational experience in initial teacher training for multilingual literacy, specifically within a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) approach. The experience was developed in response to the training needs of teachers in Madrid, Spain, a region where more than half of the primary schools are bilingual, with CLIL programmes, and where initial teacher education curricula devote few credits to language education and to CLIL. It is proposed that by working with the Reading to Learn (R2L) model, the preparation of student teachers to plan for bilingual literacy can be enhanced as they learn to provide scaffolding for developing reading comprehension and writing in academic school genres. A preliminary analysis of student teachers’ work suggests that results of the innovation led to the successful application of R2L in the development of teaching plans that fulfil the CLIL core principles and experts’ recommendations. Finally, some reflections are outlined concerning the relevance of these results for the current and future needs of primary school teachers in bi- and multilingual contexts