Clil Unit on DNA

Author: Andrea Loi - Group 4
Project title: The origins of life

Rationale

this unit  is aimed at students of second class of Liceo Scientifico, and covers one topic of the curriculum of Biology: Genetics.

The starting material is taken from a website on DNA addressed to high school students. I copied the text from the site to a word document and I worked on that.

http://hopes.stanford.edu/basics/dna/b0.html

In order to support students' learning, the document has been transformed and integrated with interactive materials in order to visually and auditorily help the learners.

Scaffolding stages

The original text has undergone three different stages of elaboration in order to offer visual, auditory and language support to the students.

Stage 1 - Text formatting

Paragraphs or sentences carrying secondary information have been removed. Headings have been provided, paragraphs shortened and keywords and phrases formatted in bold. I decided to use the colour blue for headings and to give them in the question form.

Stage 1 file

Stage 2 -Transcoding

Whole paragraphs have been trascoded into visuals, so as to simplify the communication of the concepts. In order to achieve the same aim, some images have been added.

Stage 2 file

Stage 3 - Language support

Synonyms have been added in brackets.

Stage 3 file

Activities

In order to support learning some interactive exercises have been created. Their purpose is to have students do something with the new concepts been taught to them.

The  tests have been gathered into a Tests Table of Contents, and it is possible to navigate from one to the other.

In order to support students with the pronounciation of new technical terms, a listening gap filling activity has been created with the help of a mothertongue reader, using an Audio Editor, an authentic text and Hot Potatoes.

Tests

            Assessment

The final assessment test is based on some previous activities and focuses mainly on the contents rather than on the grammatical forms, according to the criteria laid down by CLIL  and to the target level of the class

                    Assessment