Lessons Learnt from Remote CLIL and Online Interaction during COVID-19 Emergency

Starting from the remote teaching and learning experience that all Italian teachers had during the COVID-19 emergency period, this paper will focus on the main lessons learnt from remote CLIL activities planned and implemented by teachers within an online postgraduate CLIL course promoted by Università Telematica degli Studi IUL. A group of teachers described their remote CLIL activities during a “TeachMeet” webinar, attended by more than 200 participants, sharing five slides in five minutes, according to a presentation format adapted from the well-known Japanese format called “PechaKucha”. Some examples will be mentioned in this paper, referring to the different webtools used in order to plan and implement effective CLIL teaching and learning activities remotely, such as sharing boards, interactive synchronous webtools, online tools for debating, tools for cooperative writing etc. The activities described by the teachers showed the potential of learning technologies to enhance language learning and CLIL as an added value to face-to-face lessons and even more, during the remote teaching period. The common dimension of all the remote CLIL activities shown and described during the “TeachMeet” webinar is the focus on online interaction, the only way of communication among teachers and students and among peers during lockdown. Online interaction is one of the new descriptors introduced by the Companion Volume of the Common European Framework of reference (CEFRCV) published by the Council of Europe in the final version in 2020. Starting from the description of the scales on online interaction descriptors provided by the Companion Volume, the paper will try to show how remote CLIL teaching and learning experiences during the COVID-19 emergency fostered the students’ online interaction in the foreign language, enhancing communicative skills through multimodality.