3 Religion and English improvement from a CLIL perspective

- Communicative skills are promoted

- A shift from teacher-led to children-led activities is promoted.

- Language incidental learning occurs and is considered also when teaching

- Context and culture are integrated in the process

3 RELIGION AND ENGLISH IMPROVEMENT FROM A CLIL

PERSPECTIVE

In the previous chapter a brief theoretical basis for CLIL has been laid down.

Now we will try to show briefly how RE, when taught in English, contributes to the aims of a BEP:

1. RE contributes to the development of skills in English thanks to:

- Richness of vocabulary. The range of words covered is wider than that of subjects like Physical Education or A&C and it could be similar to that of Science (when History and Geography are part of it). The corpus of words used in some subjects has two disadvantages for the BEP:

a) A big deal of the vocabulary is not of common use in everyday language, such as botanic taxation, chemical properties of elements, ancient history, games and sports from other cultures, etc. RE is based on many everyday used words and even the most specific vocabulary children will use (God, Church, Assembly, Gospel, Saint, Holy, pray, Mass, faithful, Catholic....) is somehow a source of common cultural background since Religion is present in our countries, sometimes in an explicit way, always because it has permeated our culture.

b) In some subjects, a very limited number of grammatical structures suffices for going through it with a further development of skills in SL. For example, if we set apart classroom language which is common to any subject, in PE there is a clear tendency to overuse verbal present tenses and the lexis is very limited. I have been randomly taking a few pages from a Physical Education and a Science book for first year of the Secondary stage and compared to the parable of the Good Samaritan. The number of words in KET lexis was clearly inferior in the case of PE and Science. This is not a scientific method and no clear conclusion can be

drawn from it, but give as an idea.

c) RE deals with a vast number of fields: History (Sacred History, History of the Church), Geography (of the Holy Land, Religions in the world), World Religions, Liturgy (Rites, Church Year, Sacraments), ethics, attitudes, everyday circumstances and so on.

d) RE fits a good number of teaching methodologies: readings, listening, debates, drama, collaborative learning, group work, social work and all those in common with other subjects.