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Organization of the research
The whole project had very extensive logistics as an attempt was made to cover as many aspects of CLIL as possible (discussed in detail in Section 6 of this paper). The organization of the project encompassed the following aspects:
(1) Preparation of material as students did not want to follow a course book,
(2) Exploring various other fields of interest to students (football, car/motorcycle parts, etc.)
(3) Designing a syllabus as the classes had to be planned well,
(4) Finding ways of initiating student cooperation,
(5) Developing means for monitoring progress,
(6) Finding an appropriate way of introducing grammar (students showed a strong dislike towards it),
(7) Developing ways of revising.
As students rejected to using a course book, each of them was asked to have a standard, A4, notebook. During the first class, each of them needed to either to draw or paste a picture of a person they liked on the front page of the notebook. Next to the picture of a person, students were asked to write the person’s personal data. The notebook was going to be the person’s diary. The aim was to keep an imaginary person’s diary and depict the person in different situations. At the end of each class, students were asked to select a topic they would like to cover next time. Both the students and the teacher had time until the next class to prepare materials needed. For instance, when the girls wanted to talk about clothes, their homework was to cut up from newspapers different garments and glue them into their notebook, i.e. ‘diary’. During the class, students would
learn the names of those pieces of clothing and then write a paragraph about the person’s fashion style(s). Having done that, students would be asked questions regarding their own fashion preferences, for example. If some new grammar items were crucial for executing the task, students would get a brief explanation whereupon they would keep a record of new grammar items at the back of the notebook. By doing so, grammar was not imposed on students. On the contrary, they felt a great need to learn new grammatical items so as to express their ideas, thoughts and feelings in the most appropriate and accurate way. The following was covered during the course of a year: Present Simple, Present Continuous,
Past Simple, asking questions, plural of nouns and modal verbs.
When students would learn a new vocabulary item, they would be asked to write it on a slip of paper and insert it in their ‘glossary box’ (an empty shoe box was used as the students’ glossary of new vocabulary). The students were very fond of the ‘glossary box’ idea as they decorated it and used it often instead of a dictionary. When a class was devoted to revision of vocabulary, slips of paper with words on them would be pulled put for dictation, writing sentences, writing a chain story, etc. Besides the graphical record of the word, different other pieces of information regarding a new word were recorded on the slip – pronunciation, part of speech and sometimes its Serbian equivalent. It was the students’ responsibility to initiate the topic for the following class and do necessary research and/or find adequate material. Topics covered included the following: best friend, family, home, cloths, cosmetics, shopping, at school, at the seaside, at a party, film scenario, in a gym, home town history, geographical description of their home town, a math problem and the like. In order to achieve the exchange of ideas, knowledge and experience, as well as to have some other person recognize students’ achievements, rather than the teacher, the pen-friend practice was initiated (girls wrote to each other, whereas boys wrote to each other). Student wrote letters to each other and the teacher would deliver them. By doing so, they were additionally motivated to search for words and vocabulary to express themselves in the best possible way, as well as to be better than the pen friend.
Students were responsible for writing a letter on their own outside the class. In that way, the teacher was not at the student’s disposal as a resource, but the student needed to find other sources of help, information or inspiration. They would usually write about themselves and their own families, as well as about their imaginary person.
Having all the aforementioned class preconditions in mind (absence of motivation, dislike of course books and grammar, etc.), it seemed that a diagnostic test of any kind would be a deterrent, rather than a stimulus. Hence, meticulous notes were taken for the whole duration of the project on student’s mistakes, knowledge requests (when they themselves were in need for a word or a grammar item and asked for it), mistakes made, progress with respect to correcting the mistakes or their fossilization, the length of their utterances, etc.
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