Student driven CLIL: letting the learner lead the way

The materials used in many ESP courses are chosen and elaborated by the teacher. Inviting students to select and elaborate materials is a technique which embraces many of the principles of several approaches currently popular in ELT: TBL, CLIL, learner autonomy, language awareness, input-interaction, co-learning, peer teaching. In the project described, students are required, either individually or in groups, to prepare various activities for use both in the class and as part of ranging from a short presentation to a student led seminar, from reading and listening comprehension exercises to a linguistic analysis of a text. Students reported that the tasks require them to prepare texts/topics in much greater depth than if they were doing exercises from a text book or prepared by the teacher. They also find this active participation in shaping the course content highly motivating, not least because they are curious to see what other groups prepare.