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A CLIL Approach to The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
This class takes an innovative approach to developing academic English skills for highly motivated
Japanese students in an elective upper-level academic English course. It is taught in a slightly CLIL
manner (Content and Language Integrated Learning), which means that there are support materials
in Japanese to help learners grasp the main concepts so they can focus on learning the academic
English that is so abundant in the main text. In a previous year, the text was divided into 22 equal
sections, and pairs of students made summaries in Japanese of the contents. They recorded these
and uploaded PDFs and audio files to a Moodle Database, which made it very easy for me to
manage and collate over 100 files and merge them together. While making the summaries was a
great learning experience, in future years these efforts do not have to be duplicated as student can
now benefit from these summaries.
The overall aim is to enable students to develop their proficiency in using English by doing
intensive, focused reading and listening to a book that’s internationally popular about living
effectively. There will be a focus on English listening skills and responding to comprehension
questions about the text context. Reading, listening, and speaking activities will be balanced to
develop students’ proficiency in academic English. This is Part 1 of a two-semester course covering
the habits of individual effectiveness (Part 2 covers interpersonal effectiveness).
- Teacher: Andrew Obermeier