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Cognitive Aspects of CLIL Teaching: Arithmetic in the Classroom Piet Van de Craen, Katrien Mondt & Marielyne Millec

Cognitive Aspects of CLIL Teaching: Arithmetic in the Classroom Piet Van de Craen, Katrien Mondt & Marielyne Millecam. CLIL Schools in Brussels. Dutch-speaking schools teach three subjects in two languages (80% Dutch - 20% French): crafts environmental studies arithmetic

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Cognitive Aspects of CLIL Teaching: Arithmetic in the Classroom Piet Van de Craen, Katrien Mondt & Marielyne Millec

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  1. Cognitive Aspects of CLIL Teaching: Arithmetic in the Classroom Piet Van de Craen, Katrien Mondt & Marielyne Millecam

  2. CLIL Schools in Brussels • Dutch-speaking schools teach three subjects in two languages (80% Dutch - 20% French): • crafts • environmental studies • arithmetic • Research interests: • learning processes • implicit and explicit learning of languages • brain organization • brain organizational differences in bi- and monolingual children • cognitive development • the level attained compared to control groups

  3. Learning Processes 1 • Implicit and explicit learning or incidental and intentional learning • focus on meaning rather than on form; • age dependent? • relatively few classroom studies in a natural environment are available. • State-of-the-art: implicit learning supported by explicit teaching seems to yield the best results...

  4. Learning Processes 2 • CLIL in primary schools is associated with implicit learning • children start at an early age in kindergarten; • there is no formal study of the language before form 5. • Three groups of children process CLIL differently in this context: • Dutch-speakers: early bilingualism; • French-speakers: support in the mother tongue; • other language speakers: learner support in two non-native languages.

  5. Brain organization 1 • 32 children (age 8-9 years old) were scanned under three conditions • a verb generation test with visual stimuli : • e.g. food --> to eat • an arithmetic test : • e.g. 4+3 = 6+2 • the Stroop test : • measuring selective attention • Results : there are differences in brain organization between early bilinguals, early late bilinguals and monolinguals...

  6. Brain organization 2 • The interpretation of these results is as yet unclear. They may lead to • ‘better brains’ (cf. Scientific American, Sept. 2003); • positive learners’ effects (cf. OECD, section on learning and the brain); • added cognitive effects (cf. Fabbro 1999 and others). • In any case: there is no evidence that CLIL teaching has negative effects for the learner nor that any knowledge is hampered.

  7. Brain organization 2 • Brain activity involving L1 in a bilingual population (N=12)

  8. Brain organization 3 • Brain activity involving L2 in a bilingual population (N=13)

  9. Cognitive development 1 • Cognitive development is here defined as follows: the results of a standardized arithmetic test. • Pupils from three CLIL schools... • with for 4 years of CLL... • matched to a comparable control school for SES and language background.

  10. Cognitive development 2 • The arithmetic test consists of nine sub-tests varying from simple calculations to decimal fractions and to more complicated problems that are verbally phrased. • Examples • 632 + 205 = • 2/5 out of 100 • A music festival has 500 entry tickets. 386 have already been sold. How many tickets are left? • It is hypothesized that CLIL pupils score at least equally well on these tests.

  11. Cognitive development 3 • Results for three CLIL schools and one comparable control group after 4 years...

  12. Cognitive development 4 : results • For nearly all sub-tests +CLIl pupils outperform -CLIL pupils. • Remarkably, this is also true for schools that have not used arithmetic in the CLIL curriculum. • Performing arithmetic is a language related activity. • Differences between experimental ad control groups tend to be smaller if tasks are less language related. • The more verbally the task is phrased the bigger the difference between experimental and control group. • The more difficult the tasks are -as in the case of fractions- the bigger the difference between experimental and control group.

  13. The Research Project: Final conclusions • CLIL education - even unbalanced in terms of hours devoted to the second language- entails positive learning effects. • It seems that in primary schools and in a multilingual context such as Brussels CLIL enhances pupils’ capacity to reason in the abstract. • CLIL education enhances pupils’ results on cognitive tests … • CLIL education prepares pupils for secondary education where the level of abstraction is much higher...

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