Revision is indispensable for the teaching of all subjects as it is a key pedagogical stage when both teachers and students reflect on their teaching and learning and make improvement and reinforcement accordingly. However, as all the subject content to be revised has been taught, students may find revision boring and hence become demotivated. When designing revision activities, teachers may take into consideration learner diversity elements such as learning styles and multi-intelligence. For CLIL teachers, it will be also beneficial to teach students learning strategies to facilitate their mastery of both academic content knowledge and academic language knowledge. The ultimate teaching goal at the revision stage is to provide students with both content and language support so that they develop sense of autonomy and confidence and foster the habit of self-directed learning.
The following revision activities show how the teacher helped her students to review the content knowledge in the science subject through different language-related activities such as：
•-a game for reviewing subject-specific vocabulary,
•-a game for reviewing key concepts,
•-an English song focusing on the main topic,
•-a Q & A game checking both the students’ understanding of the content knowledge and their awareness of the academic language features, and
•-a collaborative reading activity during which students took turns to ask each other questions based on the handout texts which were re-edited from the science text-book.
The games for reviewing the subject-specific words and key concepts in the videos engaged all students including those less proficient ones. These games are very effective revision activities as they make the memorisation (of the spelling of science vocabulary and the meaning of abstract concepts) less boring (in games), less demanding (in team-work) and more exciting (in competitions). As most of the South Asian students in the school are music lovers, the revision activity with an English song motivated the students successfully as many of them felt very excited and asked for permission to sing along while they were filling in the lyrics.
The revision activities not only engaged the students to revisit the entire unit in a motivating way but also drew their attention to the different learning strategies by which language facilitates science learning effectively. For example, the teacher guided students to revisit key science concepts in context (i.e., sentences or diagrams); she showed the students a different method of learning science through language arts (e.g., lyrics in songs); and she also encouraged students to use the texts for both collaborative and self-directed learning of the science subject. To show the students how to revise the unit according to the text-based materials, the teacher edited the lessons in the unit into passages of different text types and printed them as handouts. She guided the students to read the text by summarising its main organisation on the PPT (e.g., a Compositional Report describing parts of wholes). She also illustrated explicitly different sentence patterns in the texts with their corresponding academic functions.
The design of the revision activities was adjusted to cater for learner diversity in different classes. For example, as most students in Class 2 are less proficient and prefer to learn the subject through activities like games, the teacher made good use of PPT to design a Q & A competition which allowed her to highlight explicitly the main content knowledge and the specific language features in both aural and visual ways. While in Class 1 whose students are more disciplined and prefer group discussion, the teacher also assigned the Q & A task but did not ask questions in all the texts (as she did in Class 2). Rather, she encouraged the students to ask and answer questions in pairs in the way she did with them (i.e., using the key sentence patterns as question prompts to raise questions) so as to provide the students with more collaborative and self-directed learning opportunities.
During the revision, the students participated in different learning activities attentively. They took notes, highlighted text structures and sentence patterns on the handout, and took turns to ask each other questions. Some of them who had problems asked their teacher or the more proficient peers for answers; some found the text-based learning “so good” a method to help them to prepare for “the exam”; and some seemed to be so engaged in the language-based learning strategy that they kept on discussing the texts in the handouts even during the recess.