This course aims to provide the students with a thorough grounding of the bilingual school. The units focus on developing students’ understanding of the key bilingual programmes in Spain and the functioning of a bilingual school. The course is divided into ten units which cover three main areas. Firstly, we will look at the process of becoming a bilingual school, developing the programme within the school and learning how to assess the effectiveness of the bilingual program and training needs. Secondly, we will discuss the organisation of the bilingual school and the main staffing positions. We will focus on the role of four key staff members: the school head, the bilingual coordinator, teacher and language assistant. Lastly, we will consider the bilingual classroom and the roles of the pupils, especially those with special language needs and their families.

After favourably completing the course, students will be able to understand i) the process of becoming a bilingual school, challenges and how to overcome them ii) key roles within the bilingual school; iii) classroom organization; and iv) pupils and their families.

The individual and collaborative tasks required throughout the course will encourage critical reflection, deeper learning and field research.

The students will analyze the competences needed to carry out their teaching practice in a CLIL classroom. They will reflect on their own needs and will know about the current requirements to fulfill the CLIL teacher profile. Besides, some of the latest approaches to teaching will be under discussion to bring forth their benefits for the CLIL lesson, as well as to be aware of the foreseen difficulties to integrate content and language learning. The students will analyze some perspectives that claim a counterbalanced approach to actually make the integration feasible.

Moreover, attention will be paid to engaged teaching and its contribution to meet the CLIL needs, as well as on critical thinking and multiple intelligence. The students will also learn about the specific resources to foster the construction of a collaborative environment in different contexts: in the classroom with their student and in the educational center with their colleagues, where focus will be paid on the team teaching technique to create a collaborative network.

Finally, they will reflect on the teachers’ communicative strategies and language use in the CLIL lesson in order to ensure and facilitate content comprehension and CLIL language acquisition. This will be done from a multimodal perspective, based on the understanding that meaning is expressed and understood through different forms and resources, and speech is just one of them.

CLIL uses the target language for a curricular purpose, so that the language becomes a means to an end rather than an end in itself. In other words, the knowledge of the language becomes the means of learning other subject content. Planning and designing a CLIL curriculum —integrating language-related and content-related goals and outcomes— is one of the most difficult aspects for a teacher enrolling on a CLIL project. An understanding of the core features of CLIL, and how these are related to best practices in education, is instrumental in the CLIL approach, as are building inclusive and constructive relationships with students and other members of the educational community.

The main focus of this subject, which complements the subject ‘What’s CLIL?’ and is directly connected to the subject ‘Evaluation and assessment’, is to teach students how to plan and design curricula and syllabuses in content and language integrated learning environments. Using Bloom’s Taxonomy as a starting point, students will deal with the principles and practice of syllabus design for courses taught in a foreign or additional language by analysing such topics as CLIL fundamentals, setting objectives, selecting content, lesson planning, scaffolding and assessment. The subject will also consider how CLIL best fits into the total class and school curriculum through task-based and project-based curricula. By means of the analysis of classroom experience (videos, real CLIL units, materials…), students will be shown 1) how tasks and projects should be planned within the third level of curriculum planning; and 2) how tasks and projects can help develop language competence as well as content knowledge through reading, interpreting, producing, analysing and creating.

This subject is designed to help teachers incorporate new technologies into their bilingual classrooms. Whether you are a technological expert or a first time user of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies), the different sections presented within aim to show you how you can take advantage of these new tools to create more interactive and motivating activities for your learning environment. If education is to evolve with the times, teachers must also evolve and adapt to the way students want and need to learn.

As you have already learnt about CLIL in a previous class, the main purpose of this subject will be to provide general guidelines in order for you to use ICT to complement your CLIL classes. There is some theory that needs to be assimilated in order to fully understand what is really meant by innovative use of technologies, but the weight of the subject will be practical.

Most of the following units follow a similar format by providing ideas for the adaptation of ICT resources which will allow for the development of the students’ skills and competences, both as ICT users and as bilingual content learners. The objective is to offer an array of possibilities and resources to make your classes effective, interesting and motivating.

ICT is a flexible tool that can support different language inputs, allow for more hours of exposure to the target language, open up cross-cultural communication and widen social interaction. It caters to a wide range of learning styles and fosters constant engagement, whatever your content may be. You will soon appreciate how ICT offers dynamic opportunities for effective and creative interaction in the CLIL classroom.

Evaluation and Assessment has a two-fold objective. Firstly, internal evaluation or assessment deals with the process of assessment in CLIL, which is considered as an indispensable part of instruction and not coming just after instruction. Secondly, evaluation of bilingual programs refers to the urgent need now for more rigorous and regular monitoring of CLIL programs.

After an introductory unit in which we will define both evaluation and assessment and highlight the importance of both aspects in educational systems, we will turn to the topic of assessment. To start with, it is necessary to consider the need for changing assessment practice in today’s education so that it conforms to the principles of formative assessment or assessment for learning (AfL) and the concept of life-long learning. Other important issues in this first part are the challenges in CLIL assessment such as the roles of language in CLIL, quality standards for assessment and the use of authentic assessment tools. In this sense, special attention will be paid to the use of the European Language Portfolio (ELP) and the use of rubrics as instruments which meet the goal of integrating both content and language objectives.

As for evaluation, this second part will explore the types of evidence that should be produced during an evaluation of the impact of a CLIL program. For that purpose, and with the help of some case studies, we will firstly review the scope of earlier evaluations of bilingual immersion programs, which have focused mainly on programs’ effect on learners’ linguistic rather than content progression. Then, we will offer a template for future evaluations in order to ensure a sufficient evidence base to make secure judgments.

The activities in this final subject have been conceived to reflect on and apply the theoretical and practical contents from previous subjects so as to be able to assess students’ outcomes in an effective way, and to evaluate bilingual programs in terms of both students’ language and content progression.

This subject aims to be practical and useful for the future work in your classroom.
Practices are not work-related but academic. The student will be able to put into practice all the skills previously studied during the Master’s and be aware of the institutional, business and labour reality in the teaching field.

These practices are mandatory  and will be supervised by a tutor at the training centre, and also by a professor at UNIR. This teaching practice period are purely academic, i.e., the goal is to know how a bilingual center functions and to apply the knowledge acquired during the program in a real environment.

The duration of the teaching practice of the Master’s in Bilingual Education involves a stay in a Bilingual School (public, private, state-subsidised) or in a Bilingual Program involving 125 hours within the period specified in the academic calendar of the degree.