From the very first moment we were concerned about the poor English level of our students and, by extension, their difficulty in expressing themselves in any of the languages of the school, even in their own mother tongue. We set out from first stages the feasibility of implementing GEP in our school.  But we tried to keep on the way, encouraging our students, motivating and helping them at any time which is from our point of view and with any doubt, one of the keys of CLIL methodology. 
 
As a second language teacher we are concerned about the importance of having good communication skills in teaching contexts. I think that this course has provided us with more resources to achieve this objective. We have learned lots of interesting strategies that will be helpful in our teaching practice. GEP is not only aimed to second language acquisition so most of these strategies are very useful to promote the use of Catalan among our students. We hope to keep growing up in all senses and have the opportunity to give them more tools for their future.

 

Pupils learn best by doing and experimenting. This means they have to talk about what they are doing and why and what they are learning. The thing is, they can only do that if we as teachers are there to support them by asking the right sort of questions.This is hard to organize but we are sure we are getting there! The training period promotes self reflection on the teaching process and improves our skills to be able to create powerful communicative activities. 

 

 

As regards to the poor motivation of our students, developing and implementing CLIL triggers a move away from the traditional roles assumed by language teachers. We’ve seen CLIL context as a tool to create interactive and motivating places in our classroom. We would like to bring language learning alive and make it more relevant for our young people. This training period has given us the chance to explore our practices and improve them so as to gain deeper insights and professional development as an ESL teacher. We have explored further ways of supporting the students as regards the cognitive or linguistic demands they faced when dealing with communicative situations that threatened to lower their motivation.