Assignment+4

**Assignment 4:** Making your units rich in content

 * Deadline:** before before session 5


 * Where:** add your homework to your teaching unit "wiki"


 * What**: make sure your units are rich in content

"By Content-Rich we mean units designed to promote the learning and teaching of a foreign language -- in this case English-- through academic content. This implies that __it is the content to be learned__ (Life in Ancient Egypt, Renewable energies or Adolescent culture around the world, for example) __which determines the selection of the language items that will be presented and practiced__. Traditionally prominent language structures (present, past, conditional, comparatives, etc.) disappear from the initial stages of planning to give way to content-obligatory and content-compatible language (Snow, Met & Genesee, 1989; Gajo, 2007), that is the language items which are essential or, at least, extremely useful for the development of the content-topic and the fulfilment of the learning tasks". (Escobar, 2011).


 * Instructions**:

Take a look at the activities and tasks you have already designed for your teaching units. Are they rich in academic content? Or, are they CLIL-based?

Then:
 * Look at each of your "activities" and **__predict__** the language items that students will need to to carry out the activities. Will they need to learn __**any specific words or any specific structures**__ to understand the texts you make them read or to write what you want them to write or to speak about whatever you ask them to speak?
 * Example: if an activity is about reading a text and giving your opinion on a particular topic, you can predict that your students will need to use certain expressions like (I think... In my opinion...).
 * Example: if you are studying reptiles and you want your students to speak about a reptile, you can predict that they will need to use sentences like "It lives in...", "it usually eats..."...


 * Once you have predicted the language items your students will need for each of your activities, think of how you can help them learn these languages items (maybe by giving them examples, models, visuals, texts...).

Assigment 4 is not about designing a specific activity for your teaching unit, but about revising all your activities to make sure that:


 * 1) They are rich in academic content.
 * 2) It is the content to be learned that makes the students use the language and specific structures (not the other way around).
 * 3) You are providing the students with enough help to help them understand texts, write, speak, interact.... by giving them models, sentence starters, words, lots of oral and written texts, examples, visuals...