Boardwork

On the first day of the CLIL teacher-training course I ask teachers to define what CLIL is and what their role is and then I assert that whatever else they are, they are also language teachers. I support my claim with reference to the fact that even in their first language, they are teaching language when they define "photosynthesis" or explain what the difference between "lava" and "magma" is. The penny normally drops.

I don't do a session on boardwork on the CLIL course but I do on another teacher-training course I lead and do throw the subject in as an aside to CLIL teachers. My own boards look quite regimented but I hope that at the end of the lesson they stand as a useful learning tool in themselves (i.e. that someone who had not been in the lesson could come in, see the board, and learn something) especially as regards lexis.

My pet hate is seeing vocabulary written up badly: verbs, adjectives, articles and normal nouns written with an initial capital letter are a particular bugbear. To most eyes, I am sure the picture below looks fine but I am a pedant.

For me colours are put to specific use in the main sections of the board. The basics are simple: words and sentences in black; phonetic symbols and part-of-speech information in red; examples, answers and errors to be corrected in blue. Other colours can be used for things like aims & objectives, interesting asides, etc.

I use a little stick figure to indicate when subjects or objects are animate and also to show agent nouns. Other information is whether the verb is transitive or intranisitive and regular or not. This support enables learners to use the vocabulary correctly. You can see that example objects for the verb "scrub" are given in blue. Eliciting and providing common collocates also helps learners.

Although the boardwork featured here is from a typical EFL lesson, the principles can be applied to CLIL when teachers are concerned with providing better language support than texts usually offer.

Of course, interactive whiteboards are my favourite but I don't have them where I am working now...

How's your boardwork?

Have you used an IWB? What do you think of them? 

What type of board set-up do you usually have?

How do you use colours on your board? 

Do you organise areas of the board in specific ways?