Methodology and language for teachers who teach Science, Maths or technical subjects "bilingually" in English at secondary level
International Study Programmes, Portsmouth, United Kingdom
June 27-July 5, 2015
After a long journey by air and bus I arrived at Portsmouth Bus Station in the afternoon of a sunny summer Saturday. Not having any clue about the outfit of my host, as I knew her name only, I was quite surprised that she was an old Jamaican lady of the age of 75 with his boyfriend of age 80. They were both very fit and talkative, they immediately showed me around the town making double amount of kilometres with their car, teasing each other constantly about being late or early, taking left or right, etc. They lived on the outskirts of the old fishing town, which also served as an important military base throughout the history. From my window of a typical English terraced house I could enjoy beautiful sunsets every evening of my stay.
The first “educational” day was still privately organised: Sunday morning I took the train to visit the neighbouring cathedral city Chichester. The main street with many little shops (open for the tourists also on Sunday), and the beautiful cathedral was really worth visiting.
Monday morning brought real work – 5 days of intensive training came from 9 a.m. to 4-5 p.m. The teacher of the CLIL course (Content and Language Integrated Learning) was Mr Graham Workman, a freelance teacher trainer (www.grahamworkman.com). He was a really funny guy, a real Englishman with an extremely large amount of experience in education – worth listening to! Besides the theoretical background of CLIL we received and tried a huge amount of games, methods of learning and we were given useful websites, mobile applications that can be used during our teaching and preparations. These can all be found on the above mentioned website, really worth checking for ideas – it covers all the subjects, on every level.
Our learning group consisted of 13 students – all secondary school teachers from all over Europe: Spain, Holland, Poland, Italy, Bulgaria and Hungary. Despite the title of the course the science and human subjects were not separated into two groups - I enjoyed learning history in English, but the history teachers were not so much enthusiastic about mathematicsJ.
Besides the classroom education a guided tour was organised for our group – we got an insight into the political intrigues that determined the history of each building of the old town... In the old harbour we could test the local fishing restaurant – as a part of the intercultural experience the waitress was a Hungarian girl...
Saturday was the day of cultural experiences in the capital – early morning the whole group travelled to London by train to visit the most important museums – we chose the Science Museum – which we had to leave 10 minutes after entering due to a bomb alert and the Natural History Museum. To choose the best way to see the nicest buildings we decided to take a boat tour on the river Thames, and we could see the Tower, Tower Bridge, St. Katherine’s Docks, Westminster Abbey, Houses of Parliament, the London Eye and the Big Ben just sitting and enjoying the breeze on our faces, avoiding the crowd of tourists as much as possible.
All in all - I can just suggest to any teacher who is tired and starts loosing motivation that you should go to one of these Erasmus-sponsored trainings to get impulses again for teaching!