I’m Daniela and I teach in a high school in the South of Sardinia. Although I started my career with English, I’ve been working as a special education teacher for the last ten years now. Last year I had the chance to work on a CLIL project in my school, which was an enthusiastic yet demanding experience. I’d love to deepen my knowledge on the ways to motivate students through CLIL and I’m glad to do it with you.

From my working experience and what various studies have pointed out so far, it is important to note that CLIL benefits from technological tools and resources. The different purposes they can be used for range from enhance communication, to manage information, to create or store. They can be our students’ powerful motivator as they provide attractive visuals – basically because students are very comfortable with ICT technologies – to support language understanding, they make lessons more interactive and add variety. It’s worth remembering that along with students, there are valid benefits for teachers too, since they support their work in helping create professional and appealing materials. In addition, they can help teachers raise the students’ cultural awareness. Drawbacks to the use of ICT can be seen in being too time consuming for teachers, especially if they do not have proper digital competences or have not been trained for using technologies; as for students, ICT could make it difficult keeping them focused on the lesson. However, these aspects do not seem to affect the potential of CLIL and ICT, which can be considered as an amazing alternative to traditional language learning as they involve students in the learning process.

Research shows that it’s essential that students choose something in their ‘comfort zone’- one in which they can read quickly, enjoyably and with high levels of comprehension. In a nutshell, selecting the right book is the student’s decision and I think this is motivating and empowering. Extensive reading is complementary to intensive reading, as it helps the students practice and get a deeper knowledge of language items. But it also differs a lot from intensive reading, because of its objective to avoid too much effort and frustration in the reader. Of course this method can be accompanied by, pre-while-post reading activities, in the form of prediction games, comprehension questions, discussions or more specific language-focused work. So, Extensive Reading method is not letting the students do what they want with reading, as the teacher has an important guide role.

It has been shown that effective reading leads to the shaping of the reader's thoughts, which consequently leads many learners to show varying degrees of fluency in writing. In my week 4 ER lesson plan some of the post reading activities are based on writing, which could also be used as assessment tools.