RATE Issues

by Adina-Ilioara Cherecheș, Liceul Teoretic William Shakespeare, Timișoara

Key words: CLIL approach, CLIL methodology, heterogeneity, educational textbooks
Abstract:

A good teacher will always be open to new methods and from my perspective undestanding culturally and integrating a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) pedagogy will defintitely develop learners’intercultural undestanding. It is needed to contribute to the wider discussion on the importance of developing learners’ intercultural understanding and on how this could be achieved within the language learning paradigm. Teaching makes us realize that our educational system is still constrained by the curriculum and based on my personal experience as a language teacher I have got to the conclusion that we have had lots of materials that could serve the purpose of intercultural teaching and learning. In particular, this thought was born from a dual belief that intercultural understanding has a major role to play in understanding others, but also in enriching the language learning process for both learners and teachers.

Dealing with textual heterogeneity- means that I intend to deal with patterns which refer to the textual complexity and the declarative typology of all linguistic operations that CLIL texts and the CLIL approach involve. Possibly, there are among us teachers that are unaware of the term CLIL, but they may already have been using the CLIL methodology for many years.

Linguistics studies the organization of different aspects of the language; in our case the form, the organization. For doing that, one needs to account for the form, the substance and the relationship between the form and the situation.
The text in the CLIL approach is not studied only as a coherent verbal chain or as an element which is part of a strategy for teaching a subject, but it is seen as a declarative activity limited to a discourse speech. The texts in each unit present items wand transmitting information which attracts the reader, gains his/her attention, and then leaves him/her meditate, and the most fortunately, helps the reader, in our case the students form their own opinions regarding society and its cultural realities.
Education, in its complexity, presents situations related to students, teachers, some other employees who work close to a college or a University, they refer to their interests or the subjects they study at school ( better teaching/learning conditions, surveys, cultural realities, animals and their habitat, design and technology, climate and food a.s.o ).
Thus, the target readers are those interested in these topics, but the act of influencing opinions, values or beliefs can be both linguistic and cultural. It is at this point that the receiver (the reader) decides how and which information to process. Therefore, the teacher describes the reality in a sort of general way to give the textual content a literal tonality close to the ordinary.
For younger learners, CLIL texts can be easily recognized as their style is simple and clear: the phrases are short, without complicated forms and they follow the usual construction S-V-DO/IO with very few adjectives. There are not any quotes or rhetorical questions, but the ideas presented in the texts refer to proven facts or personal opinions from the writer of the text. Moreover, the use of tenses shows that present tenses are very frequently used, especially the simple present. Most common time expressions are “often” (we often do sports –CLIL PE, we often communicate with images- CLIL Art, it doeasn’t rain very often- CLIL Geography) and „usually” ( people usually eat a lot of meat-CLIL Geography, we usually do outdoor sports- CLIL PE).

The most important thing that I want to add to this first presentation is that the educational texts respect the following “five commandments”:
• “Who or What- it gives identity to the person or to the thing to know about;
• When- it gives temporal details about the action or the thing
• Where- it locates, as precisely as possible the place of the event;
• How- it presents the circumstances of the event(s)
• Why – it gives the elements that make the reader understand better the event
A great tool that the teacher can use are the photos which are attached to the texts; it is proved that the visual impact maximizes the importance of any text, and an English textbook is not an exception.
Illustration has an essential role in exploiting educational texts, but we should not forget that a detailed description can have the same impact on the reader, moreover it has the advantage to be less ostentatious than the image, as the description sinks into the text.
The description is never neutral, but it is for sure a “proof”, as Aristotle said. It proves the reported fact, and tends to get as close as possible to reality. The beauty of a text consists in all the elements that make it be feature as a whole, and its persuasive message shows its creator’s majestic skills.
But it is not simply the use of another’s words or style that gives the text its distinctive character. What is important, rather, is how the incorporated speech is exposed in its collision with the speaker’s own language and how it may come to mean something new. And, the most obvious way a writer brings another voice into a text is by direct quotation. The quotation marks signal that someone else's words are erupting into the text, changing temporarily the voice speaking.
Similar to it, but a little less obvious, is indirect quotation, where the writer paraphrases the words of the other voice but clearly identifies the other voice as the source of the ideas. Through paraphrase the writer can interpret the meaning of the indirectly quoted material and focus attention on details most relevant to his or her own point.
The free forms that are able to operate at the rank of a unit get into the reader’s attention a complex syntax, clauses and sentences, and in the end to a grammatical system. “The linguist’s object of study is the language and his object of observation is the text: he describes language and he relates it to the situations in which it is operating”. (Halliday 1996: 18)

Bibliography:
1. Halliday, M. Language as social semiotic. London: Edward Arnold.
2. LIMBA ENGLEZĂ - pentru studiu intensiv. Clasa a V-a. MANUAL Cambridge

Biodata:

2004/09 – 2006/06 -Post University Studies: Culture and Management in the European Space, UVT, Timisoara;
2000 – 2003-Administration and Communication College, Timisoara,
1999 – 2003- University of West from Timisoara, Bachelor of Arts, French –English specialization;
2013-present: English teacher , Liceul Teoretic William Shakespeare , Timisoara
2007/09-2008/08: Assistant teacher at Denstone College,location : Stafforshire, Uttoxeter, UK.
2006/09- 2012- English teacher, Liceul Tehnologic de Posta si Telecomunicatii, Timisoara.
She has remarked herself by perceptiveness to enriching teaching-evaluation methods to the European standards. She is dedicated to her work and has great linguistic abilities, having coordinated artistic activities in French and English for different contests.