Biodata

Rachel Whittaker is a lecturer in the English Department of the U. Autónoma Madrid. She is founder-member of the UAM-CLIL research group, and works in literacy in L2. Her publications include The Roles of Language in CLIL (CUP 2012), a book on language use and development in CLIL classes (author of the chapters on text structure and language and writing development), co-editor of Language and Literacy: Functional Approaches (Continuum 2006) and Advances in Language and Education (Continuum 2007) and, La composicion como comunicación: una experiencia en aulas de bachillerato (Ediciones UAM 2005). She recently coordinated Spain’s team in the project: Teacher Learning for European Literacy Education (tel4ele.eu), and organized the conference: Literacy across the curricula in different languages and contexts (telcon2013). She has published a number of articles on the experience which included in-service teacher training and evaluation of impact on teachers and students. She works on writing in CLIL contexts from a genre and register perspective.

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.