HOW CAN WE LINK LANGUAGE LEARNING AND COMMUNICATIVE

COMPETENCE WITH BLOOMS THINKING SKILLS?

Narrowing the concept of CLIL (content and language integrated learning) is
certainly a very difficult task to face. Different approaches have been made but
probably the most well-known would be the one by Bloom. His taxonomy presents a
model of learning throughout six different skills. But how can we be sure students are
achieving a communicative competence by applying this method?
Commonly, teachers use the lower order skills proposed by this linguist, namely
remembering, understanding and applying. But it has been widely proved that these
three alone are not enough to reach an effective communication competence, thus it is
necessary to implement the remaining Blooms categories, scilicet analysis, synthesis
and evaluation.
As far as my experience has allowed me to check and taking into consideration
that the current example is based upon a pre-school class, I use to put in practice each
of them with a range of activities. Regarding remembering, I use flashcards to teach
the pupils new vocabulary. As to understanding I use word family classification which
can help them to relate the new contents. Moving now to applying, I use wordplays in
order to create hypothetical situations in which they can use the targeted vocabulary.
Shifting now to analysing I invite my students to compare and organise learned
contents. As for synthesizing I request them to create and design through draws and
projects. Finally, in regard to evaluating I use self-assessment and peer correction.
To sum up, when all of the steps mentioned above are properly applied and our
pupils are guided through all of them, we can be sure that the result is a successful
CLIL teaching and an acquired communicative competence in any language or topic.