O'CLIL: Integrating Language Learning into Daily Routines

O’CLIL stems from the CLIL methodology, aiming to increase foreign language exposure, incorporate new contexts, and offer meaningful input to young students. The playground, dining room, or even the bathroom can become rich settings for content development. Daily routines allow for the repetition of meaningful language. Children’s actions can be orally described by the teacher, and visual aids like real objects provide extra interest and meaning to language learning. Even gesturing while speaking helps to better understand the message.

Linguistic Competence

• Reinforce grammar and syntax.
• Foster vocabulary comprehension. Vocabulary is presented in a context full of repetitions, providing learners with ample opportunities to understand and check meanings.
• Promote awareness of sounds and sound-letter relationships.
• Serve as a model for writing.
• Exposure to literary conventions such as metaphors, emphasis, direct and indirect speech, even if students are unaware.
• Reading promotion.

Sociolinguistic and Pragmatic Competence

• Provide examples of differences in register and dialect.
• Illustrate politeness conventions, ways of addressing different people, and variations in dialogue used according to social relations.
• Expose students to varieties of language.

Discourse Competence

Through stories and storytelling, young learners:

• Are exposed to language in context.
• Learn to identify cohesion and coherent devices and text design, thus being able to understand messages as a whole.
• Understand the conventions of different types of texts.

Sociocultural Competence

• Get to know typical stories from different places and cultures.
• Learn about cultural features such as games, meals, and customs.
• Can better understand intercultural situations.

Cross-Curricular Integration

• Reinforce conceptual development.
• Consolidate learning in other school subjects.
• Integrate aesthetic manifestations.
• Help develop creative skills and aesthetic response.

"Cuentos" (Stories) Before You Tell

• Remind children of other stories with similar content.
• Provide a summary of the main storyline beforehand.
• Set the scene by drawing upon the children’s experiences related to the story.
• Introduce keywords and new words through pictures, mime, or objects.
• Introduce or revise sentence patterns or expressions.
• Story told in the first language.

While You Tell

• The use of gesture, mime, actions, or movements is important. You can mime a part of the story.
• Use pictures, objects, masks, or puppets.
• Tell a wrong version of the story – stopping and asking: what comes next?
• Ask them what they would do in the situation presented in the story.
• Use sequence cards or pictures.

After You Tell

• Making something: puppets.
• Organizing an event.
• Finding the mistakes in a text.
• Analyzing the story.
• Playing “throw the ball and continue the story.”
• Role-play, making rhymes, charts…