Multimedia [science+foreign language] transfer: a tool for innovative 21st century learning.

Few would argue that science-education is in need of renovation to meet both 21st century skills requirements and today’s technological reality: as educators, we can no longer equate information regurgitation with knowledge. In addition, memorized scientific formulas and details do not found the deep-level understanding that is necessary for 21st century citizens to discern credible information from the inundation of text found with a “Googling-click”. Likewise foreign language (FL) education: traditional ways of learning a foreign language are contributing little to cultivating communicatively competent FL-users for a multilingual globalized 21st century workforce. In this paper, we discuss the use of CLIL – Content and Language Integrated Learning – as a pragmatic and realistic way to renovate 21st century science and FL-education. As CLIL aims for a [50Content/50Language] learning context whereby the 50Language attends to the language of the learner and not of the teacher, it automatically establishes a student-centred learning context whereby students use the FL to understand, negotiate and construct new knowledge. Done well, CLIL-science is proving itself to be a pragmatic means to renovate both science as well as FL-learning, supporting not only authentic, spontaneous and fluent FL-use, but also the acquisition of transferable understandings of key scientific concepts. In fact, CLIL-science offers a highly brain compatible approach to scienceeducation and, while rendering learning brain-compatible would seem an obvious issue to consider, this actually offers a concrete guideline for renovating 21st century education. To take “renovation towards innovation”, multimedia CLIL-science materials have been developed at the Faculty of Science of the University of Calabria within a science-education project involving 30 local middle schools and high schools whereby 20% of the laboratory-based modules were also offered through CLIL. In addition to being interactive, the materials were developed with attention to certain understandings of how the brain processes incoming information so that the acquisition of novel science concepts were scaffolded through familiar FL grammar. Furthermore, the multimedia materials were developed so to optimize for the bidirectional transfer between two complementary but otherwise distinct disciplines. Along with the multimedia CLIL-science materials, this talk will also discuss the findings from neuroscience research on information processing which should guide the development of brain-compatible learning.