Kazakhstan is at the beginning of the implementation of a trilingual education system. This will involve mother tongue Kazakh speakers learning Russian, Russian speakers learning Kazakh and both of these groups learning English. The aim is to move from segregated Russian and Kazakh medium schools towards a fully integrated, internationalised system of education with specific subjects taught in specific languages throughout the education system. Cambridge International Education Centres of Excellence has been working with the Ministry of Education for a number of years to enable significant quality improvements in a number of areas.
This workshop, run by Jason Skeet and Alan Mackenzie, was designed to introduce the principles of CLIL in as practical a way as possible for teacher trainers. Additional time was taken up exchanging views on: what exactly the terms trilingual education and CLIL mean in Kazakhstan; how to develop effective CLIL materials for this context; what those might look like; what levels of English language proficiency are appropriate for delivering CLIL in different scholastic contexts; strategies for teachers with particularly low proficiency levels tasked with delivering CLIL; the nature of differing linguistic complexity in English, Kazakh, and Russian.
On the final day, during an action planning session, we conducted an activity that extended the investigation of individual development needs to generating ideas from the trainers for:
- future resource development for teachers, students and trainers,
- courses and other short to medium-term interventions such as coaching
- longer term development programmes
This was cleared in advance by the director of the Centre, and welcomed as a way of helping the Centre set its future agenda. When presented with the idea, the director noted that this was a great way of generating ideas from the bottom up and will help set the Centre’s future development agenda.
