«Learning in the Traces of Greek Culture»: A CLIL Project for Raising Cultural Awareness and Developing L2 Skills

Abstract: In response to the new demands of education in Greece, including a significant percentage of multilingual and multicultural student populations, the need of teaching Greek as a Second language (GL2) has been mandatory for the sake of immigrant students ‟ inclusion in the dominant society. This pilot project, following the Content and Language Integrated Learning (C.L.I.L) approach, has been piloted with a class of 30 immigrant children (aged 11 years old) of Albanian origin, who had been attending a Greek primary school for 3 years. It was initiated with the purpose to provide insights into developing students‟ skills in GL2 and aspects of Greek culture and history. The mini syllabus was developed on the basis of criteria for developing sustainable CLIL teaching as suggested by Coyle‟s 4 Cs framework (2007) and was designed around ten units with famous Greek ancient monuments being at the core. For the estimation of the feasibility of this project, there have been used three basic tools a) a pre- and a post- test about the language and the content knowledge assessment, b) journals kept by the teacher and c) portfolios kept by the students throughout the project. The findings showed a significant improvement of the students ‟ skills in GL2, as well as their enhancement of content knowledge