From CLIL to Translanguaging – an Erasmus+ course in Berlin

Blog post by Riitta Ala-Pöllänen, teacher of Finnish and English at Helsingin aikuisopiston peruskoulu

During my Erasmus+ exchange, I took part in a course called ‘From CLIL to Translanguaging: Strategies to Integrate Migrants’. The course was organised by europass Teacher Academy, which offers many different courses in cities all over Europe. I chose Berlin as my course location.

An international group led to great discussions

The premises of europass Teacher Academy are in Friedrichshain in East Berlin. The district was new to me, although I already knew the city quite well. Nine participants had registered for our group, but unfortunately two never arrived, so there were only seven of us. Even though our group was small, our cultural backgrounds made it a really interesting mix: five Swedes with roots in Algeria, Somalia and China/India, one Spaniard and me, a Finn through and through. Our teacher was Barbara – a lovely, genuine and talkative Italian! With these backgrounds, our daily discussions were long, wide-ranging and really rewarding – sometimes so much so that we forgot to take breaks in the middle of all the talking.

Barbara is a charming teacher with both academic knowledge and many years of practical experience in teaching languages to immigrants – even ‘from the front line’ in Calabria, Italy, where tens of thousands of immigrants have arrived over the years. She told us moving and educational stories about different ways of supporting integration and teaching language.

Language immersion and translanguaging

Every day we looked at language learning from a different point of view, first through theory and then through practical examples and stories. I teach Finnish as a second language and also English to adult immigrants who are studying in basic education. I first trained as a teacher in the 1980s and studied English philology in the early 2000s, so ideas about language learning have changed quite a lot since then (fortunately!). On this course, I learnt a great deal more about the subject.

CLIL, which is mentioned in the name of the course, means Content and Language Integrated Learning. In Finland, it is used in language immersion and partial immersion teaching. In CLIL, the foreign language is used only in learning situations. The main topic of the course, translanguaging, sees different languages as supporting each other. This is why the languages that students already know are used in learning. The method encourages students to use all their languages and dialects flexibly to communicate and to explain their ideas to others.

Plenty of culture in my free time

After the course days, I explored Berlin’s cultural life on my own at art exhibitions, the ballet and concerts around the city. Course participants also had the chance to join two walking tours. My new acquaintance, Friedrichshain, is a diverse, interesting and slightly rough part of Berlin. Between squatted houses covered in graffiti, there are beautiful parks that are clearly the locals’ ‘living rooms’ all day long. There are good restaurants side by side in every block, spreading out onto street terraces. The atmosphere is calm and lively at the same time.

Inspired for the future

This Erasmus+ experience was excellent. However, in one week we could only scratch the surface of the course topics, which were mostly completely new to me. It would be great to take part in a ‘follow-up course’ to deepen and widen this knowledge. Choosing was already difficult when I was planning my trip, because there is a long list of courses on different topics, and it was hard to decide which course to take and in which city. Maybe next year I will want to learn something completely new again!