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CLIL4U Pre-Course Unit 5 - Cognition

Cognition

Cognition is one of the platforms (the five Cs) on which CLIL is based.

Of course, teachers had been helping students learn to think long before the CLIL approach was introduced (1). They have always asked their students ‘when?’, ‘where?’, ‘which?’, ‘how many?’ and ‘who?’ (2). These questions focus on real, specific and concrete answers. Students who have learnt to answer them correctly have developed the thinking skills of recalling, repeating and listing, and of understanding (3).

Bloom’s Taxonomy had categorised thinking skills as Lower Order Thinking Skills (LOTS) and Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) as early as 1956 (4), although it was revised in more recent years by Anderson and Krathwohl. According to the Taxonomy, students practising LOTS, as in the questions above, learn to remember and understand information, and to explain it. They also learn to apply new information in a different situation.

The CLIL approach has attempted to add to these concrete thinking skills by adopting more abstract, complex and analytical questioning (5). This is not just for older or more able students, but in all lessons. A student following a CLIL course will soon have learned to think about such probing questions as ‘why?’, ‘how?’ and ‘what evidence is there?’, and so will have practised Higher Order Thinking Skills (6). Using HOTS encourages students to investigate and evaluate new information and to use it to develop something new.

CLIL teachers design questions, activities and tasks so that by the end of a lesson students will have had opportunities to develop both LOTS and HOTS (7).

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This Unit forms part of a language course designedto help teachers refreshtheir English language skills.

It was developed as part of the EU Project ‘CLIL4U’, and is intended as preparation for the main CLIL4U course onTeaching through CLIL.

To follow the language course, click on the CLIL4U Pre-Course Homepage button below.

Short url:   https://multidict.net/cs/2292