Category: GRETA Journal — 2014, Volume 22

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) represents a revolutionary approach to knowledge in contexts of bilingual education: language is both a vehicle of communication and a tool to access disciplinary knowledge, i.e. the content of the subjects that make up the curriculum. In this article, we explore the concept of CLIL from a historical and critical standpoint, as a timely response to an age characterized by historical acceleration on an unprecedented scale in the history of humankind (except for the Industrial Revolution) and as a new educational approach that allows for a more holistic approach to human knowledge, which is itself a network of closely interrelated concepts, even if curriculum design appears to split it up into seemingly unconnected subjects or disciplines. In addition, we look at the innumerable reasons why it is necessary to learn languages (both modern and classical) in a new century and millennium, in a world whose main richness lies in the linguistic and cultural diversity of human ecology, in knowledge and in creativity.

GRETA Journal — 2014, Volume 22. Reviews section. p. 61

GRETA Journal — 2014, Volume 22. Historical author guidelines. p. 65

The objective of this research is the analysis and definition of the language of abstracts in bilingual education journal papers regarding macro- and micro-structure. The present research involves an experiment based on the analysis of a genre in the field of bilingual education with a corpus of 56 abstracts published in indexed journals. Genre analysis helps determine and reproduce specific forms of language, creating basic rules about their use which enable individuals apply them to real contexts. Results show the most common features shared among the documents analyzed. Discussion of these results focuses on the elaboration of some guidelines on how to write abstracts addressed to bilingual education journal papers. Since the amount of genres is near infinite, these guidelines are actually expected to help researchers in this field write their abstracts in a more successful way.

Over the last decades, content and language integrated learning (CLIL) research has largely focused on the analysis of the implementation and potential linguistic benefits and drawbacks of this approach. More recently, however, research studies are taking a step back and focusing on the key term integration in CLIL. This article aims at making a proposal for classroom practices that may help us turn this integration into a reality by bringing the language and the content paradigms closer together. In so doing, we will try to provide an answer to some of the challenges that CLIL raises by targeting the often forgotten element in the CLIL equation, namely subject content, and the possible detrimental effects of CLIL on studying a subject matter through a foreign language.

GRETA Journal — 2014, Volume 22. Editorial. p. 5

The present paper discusses the importance of teaching culture in class nowadays and proposes a specific example of doing so by focusing on Jewish culture. The paper reviews some of the most important themes that have been included in that culture throughout its history and it shows Jewish fiction and the conflictive depiction of Jews in literature and fiction in general. Given the power of fictional resources as a useful tool, it also delves into the role of multicultural fiction in the didactics of foreign language and literature. The last part of the paper is the actual design of a didactic proposal based on Jewish fiction to work with pre-service EFL teachers in order to make a contribution to the current necessity of training teachers in intercultural aspects.

Many general EFL textbooks addressed to Spanish secondary and post-secondary education learners continue to teach pronunciation in an isolated way, by means of tables or sections which are clearly separated from the parts which focus on the teaching of other language areas. Moreover, in spite of the large list of materials and resources currently available for teaching pronunciation in an engaging and motivating way, these materials still resemble traditional techniques, failing on many occasions to move away from isolated drills of random words and discrimination tasks. The present article hence aims at describing some ideas and activities for teaching pronunciation in an integrated, and, most importantly, in an engaging and motivating way for students. Although the activities included here have been explicitly designed for high-school students, they could easily be adapted to make them suitable for younger learners or even adult EFL students.