Biodata

Aoife Ahern is a tenured senior lecturer in the Language and Literature Pedagogy unit, School of Education, Complutense University of Madrid, teaching students who specialise in ELT in early years or primary education, courses in several MAs, continuous professional development for teachers, and supervising doctoral students. Her research deals with the interaction among grammar, semantics and pragmatics, in relation to the explicit and implicit sides of verbal communication, and on teaching, learning and acquisition of second languages. She is a regular participant in Educational Innovation projects for improving second language learning, genre pedagogy for literacy and the Reading to Learn framework, over the past 6 years. She has presented results of the development of R2L in teacher education at several international conferences on bilingual education and applied linguistics, and participated in a recent publication (Jan. 2018) related to these in the journal Lenguaje y Textos.

Reading and writing to learn: a principled approach to practice in CLIL/bilingual classes

This talk will introduce a literacy programme based on a linguistic approach to teaching reading and writing across the curriculum. Reading to Learn (Rose & Martin, 2012), accelerates literacy development in L1 and in CLIL. The pedagogy is based on powerful theories of language, educational psychology and sociology, which, applied to lesson preparation and classroom interaction, lead to immediate results in student engagement and learning. It is based on a functional analysis of a text from the curriculum -its structure and the way its language makes meaning in that subject-, and on scaffolding/ modelling the processes of reading and writing.