StepTogether - CLIL for Migrant Students in Public Education

StepTogether - CLIL for Migrant Students in Public Education

CSEREKLYE, Erzsebet Csereklye

Key words: CLIL, intercultural education, limited language codes, less taught languages,migrant integration ABSTRACT The StepTogether program at the University of Miskolc develops a CLIL teaching tool d for migrant children attending primary school in 3th–8th grades in Hungary, where migrant children are integrated in the public education by their age, regardless their language competencies. The aim of the developers was to offer a practical help for teachers to integrate children with limited Hungarian language codes in traditional classroom activities. The StepTogether concept is helping children develop their language skills while they are dealing with the same topics as their dominant language classmates in Mathematics, Nature, Language and Literature classes. The structure of these teaching aids allows all teachers to contribute the language development process of the children and helps to create an open, intercultural classroom climate. The content-basis of the materials is in harmony with the Hungarian National Core Curriculum and Framework Curricula, while their approach is language-driven, since it’s primary goal is to improve the L2 Hungarian competencies of the immigrant children. Based on our studies, conducted with 120 migrant students and their 32 teachers in five educational institutions (two Englich-Hungarian bilingual schools, one monolingual Hungarian School and two minority schools, a Turkish and a Chinese school) for 3 years, the StepTogether teaching tool proved to be higly supportive for L2 Hungarian development, it offers an effective solution to the challenges arising from the diversity of L1 and L2 Hungarian competences within the classroom and supports the social and cultural integration process of non-dominant language students. It also helped to involve migrant parents in learning by integrating the culture of origin in the classroom work. The presentation describes the main features of the project, the structure and instruments of the language teaching tools and student and teacher feedbacks.

Article
PeerReviewed

IBU Publishing

2013-05-03

1764