Learning to plan for CLIL with the Reading to Learn approach. An experience in initial teacher training

: This article describes an innovational educational experience in initial teacher training for multilingual literacy, specifically within a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) approach. The experience was developed in response to the training needs of teachers in Madrid, Spain, a region where more than half of the primary schools are bilingual, with CLIL programmes, and where initial teacher education curricula devote few credits to language education and to CLIL. It is proposed that by working with the Reading to Learn (R2L) model, the preparation of student teachers to plan for bilingual literacy can be enhanced as they learn to provide scaffolding for developing reading comprehension and writing in academic school genres. A preliminary analysis of student teachers’ work suggests that results of the innovation led to the successful application of R2L in the development of teaching plans that fulfil the CLIL core principles and experts’ recommendations. Finally, some reflections are outlined concerning the relevance of these results for the current and future needs of primary school teachers in bi-and multilingual contexts


Introduction
Over more than a decade, a steadily increasing number of schools across Europe have initiated bilingual instruction through Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL): currently, more than half of the public primary schools of the Madrid Autonomous Region, the context of this study (Comunidad de Madrid, n.d.).CLIL is an educational approach in which the lessons in different areas of the curriculum, including natural science, geography, art and history, among others, are taught through a foreign language (hereon, L2); the teachers are most often nonnative speakers of the language of instruction.Recent developments in CLIL proposals highlight the goal of developing literacies across school subjects and languages (Coyle et al., 2023): to promote deep "understanding of subject-specific concepts alongside subject-specific ways of constructing and communicating that understanding" in the school languages (p.288).The teachers of CLIL programmes not only require strong methodological training, enabling them to effectively integrate content and language, but also high levels of linguistic competence in the L2 (Eurydice, 2023;Lasagabaster & Ruiz de Zarobe, 2010).In sum, to make it possible for effective CLIL approach implementation, a strategically designed teacher preparation basis is necessary (European Commission, 2014;Kelly et al., 2004).
There is, therefore, a well-documented need for initial teacher education (ITE) programmes to provide preparation for teaching in CLIL programmes in our context (see, e.g., Custodio Espinar & García Ramos, 2020;Fernández Cézar et al., 2013;Pérez Cañado, 2018).However, despite the innovative initiatives of Spain -and in particular the Madrid region -in offering this kind of bilingual education and the resulting human resource needs, the provision in ITE of adequate preparation of future teachers for CLIL is scarce.A low proportion of credits are dedicated to languages and methodology for language teaching (on average, 10% or less1 ), and very few, if any at all, to specific training for CLIL, in the Primary Education Degree courses in Spain.
In addition to this challenge, the attention given in Spain's ITE programmes to teacher preparation for literacy instruction, whether it is for the learners' first language or for an L2, is very limited.In an effort to overcome these hurdles, the implementation of training in the Reading to Learn (R2L) approach (Rose & Martin, 2012) has been adopted as the focus of a group of teacher educators whose work is reported on in several of the articles in the present special issue.Over the years, this group of professors have worked to help the students in ITE develop competences in Rose and Martin's proposal for scaffolded, explicit instruction on reading and writing the school genres in both Spanish, the community language, and English, the language of CLIL instruction (García-Parejo & Whittaker, 2017).The R2L approach is especially suited to education in bilingual or additional language education and for subject-specific literacies (Ahern et al., 2019;Whittaker, 2018).
Although CLIL is known for its variability, as it has been adopted in a very wide range of educational systems across different countries (Cenoz et al., 2014), there are certain basic principles put forth since its inception, usually considered as defining features of CLIL.In their highly influential work on CLIL, Coyle et al. (2010) established a set of principles for effective planning and teaching within this approach.Among the fundamental tenets of their framework, Coyle et al. (2010) identify a way to classify learners' language needs through the "language triptych", consisting of: a. language of learning-terms and phrases specifically related to the topic or area of knowledge within the school subject that learners are working on; b. language for learning-expressions and collocations that are relevant for academic purposes connected to the learning activities, applicable to different topics and school subjects; and c. language through learning-expressions and terms that students spontaneously pick up as they carry out the learning activities.
This division of language was based, in fact, on Halliday's work in the 1970's (Christie, 2018).Halliday had originally put forth a model of language development consisting of learning language, learning through language and learning about language as a framework for experts in charge of developing the national school curriculum in Australia; decades later it was adapted by Coyle et al. (2010) for CLIL.
Furthermore, in terms of the contextual components for effective CLIL, in their seminal work, Coyle et al. (2010) elaborated the "four Cs", where optimal instruction is aimed at the development of: • content knowledge, the concepts and disciplinary-specific learning required by the school curriculum; • cognitive development, entailing lasting comprehension of the concepts, strategies that enable learners to apply and use the acquired knowledge; and • communicative competence, including linguistic, multimodal, pragmatic and strategic skills for production, reception, interaction and mediation (see also European Commission, 2020); • all of the above aspects are framed within culture (culture is a complex notion; for our present purposes, it will be seen as related to the disciplinary traditions and expectations for communication within each of the school curricular areas).
The four Cs are identified as existing within the wider Context at the outermost layer, within which all these dimensions are situated (Coyle et al., 2010).This set of principles has been applied, in a wide range of educational settings, to identifying useful learning objectives and developing effective ways to work within CLIL programmes.The principles are often cited in teacher training contexts, but do not always result in successful uptake, especially when learnt by students of ITE who still lack the experience that leads to connecting theory to practice.
However impressive these goals for optimal CLIL instruction are, it is also a fact that the weight of tradition in teaching can be a heavy one, making it challenging for teachers to evolve beyond the practices that they experienced in their own studies.Traditional foreign language instructional approaches, such as asking students to memorise vocabulary or spelling lists, grammar rules that are learnt without contextualisation in communicative activities, tend to find their way into CLIL classrooms when teachers lack adequate methodological training (Frigols, in Megías Rosa, 2012;Pérez Cañado, 2018).Furthermore, it can often be the case that teachers in CLIL pay extra attention to oral language, while they may lack any systematic resources for explicit literacy teaching.
In addition, viewing language learning as, above all, reliant on studying vocabulary and grammar can lead to teaching as if meaning were separate from language.This prevents understanding language and content in an integrated way, an essential and defining feature of CLIL, as indicated by the name of the approach itself.Thus, it has been argued that effective CLIL teacher preparation must include training for literacy instruction (Beacco et al., 2016;Coyle et al., 2016;Morton, 2016), and in teaching practices based on theoretical models in which language and content can be truly integrated.
Among the specific proposals for CLIL teacher preparation, Bertaux et al. (2010) highlighted a set of competences, some of which are essential for establishing and maintaining a CLIL programme, while others are especially important for CLIL implementation.Authors including Custodio Espinar (2019) and Pérez-Cañado ( 2018) researched further into the necessary training for CLIL, as well as extending the initial proposals from up to the early 2010s.For the purposes of assessing the experience reported herein, some references will be made to these proposals as standard-setting principles, to which the student teachers' learning and coursework can be related, and as analysis criteria (see section 5).
Thus, the experience reported on in the present article brings together the abovementioned training guidelines recommended by CLIL experts with the focus on teacher learning for literacy education.The initiative for this experience builds on the success of the TEL4ELE project2 , an impact of which was the spread of R2L across 5 European countries, including Spain.In the next section, details of the R2L approach are provided.
The principal objective of this article is to report on the educational experience involving R2L within ITE in the context of the need for strong competences in language education for CLIL among the teachers of our region.Through the experience described, relevant and useful connections are revealed between the theoretical models and principles that are common to both R2L strategies and CLIL.These correspondences have not been explored very deeply, to date.Therefore, a second objective of this article is to analyse, implementing a case study approach, some of the results of the educational innovation, specifically students' achievement in literacy lesson planning for primary school CLIL classrooms.This succinct analysis will seek evidence of the potential of student teachers' use of the correspondences between R2L strategies and planning guidelines and core CLIL methodological principles.
The structure of the article is as follows.Section 1 summarises the methodology that student teachers learn in the educational experience reported on: the R2L approach.Some of the potential links between this approach and CLIL methodological principles are established.Section 2 presents a description of the educational experience.Section 3 sums up the analysis instruments and procedure to be applied in section 4, where results of the participating student teachers' work, in the form of teaching unit plans for applying the R2L approach in CLIL classrooms, will be analysed.Implications and final reflections on these teacher preparation experiences will be put forth in the final section.

Methodology: Educating teachers for reading instruction, implementing reading to learn and to write
This section describes the literacy pedagogy learnt by the students involved in the experience that is reported upon here: namely, R2L.This approach is the methodological basis of the educational work; the foundation underlying the goals and design of the teaching-learning activities for the student teachers that are described in subsequent sections.
The R2L approach (Rose & Martin, 2012) consists of a set of strategies that scaffold reading with comprehension and writing in the genres of schooling.It is, thus, a genre-based pedagogy, based on the genres identified in the Australian educational context through the work of Michael Halliday and his team, known as the Sydney School.David Rose's work has focussed consistently on developing guidance for teachers who require a clear and effective means to enable all students to achieve, and even surpass, the literacy objectives for their educational stages or grade levels (see, e.g., Rose, 2005;Rose, 2020).Through what is known as the R2L teaching-learning cycle (hereon, TLC), a set of specific strategies have been established to explicitly teach students to understand the kinds of texts they need to read and write for school.Following this, with a text that has been used for teaching comprehension as a model, the teacher guides children to write in the same genre.This is done through scaffolded interaction that leads pupils to identifying the language resources of accomplished authors that they will use in their own writing, and a variety of writing activities, in groups and individually, for working on meaning-making at the level of the whole text, paragraphs, sentences and individual words, depending on the learners' needs (Rose, 2020).
Thus, the R2L strategies provide an approach to teaching reading comprehension and writing in a cohesive way.To this end, in the R2L approach, 9 strategy sets are proposed, at three levels (the whole text, a fragment of the text -i.e., paragraph level -and the sentenceword level), depicted in the concentric circles in Figure 1.These strategies include the teacher's guidance for pupils, starting from the initial stages of reading and writing and leading up to advanced literacy (see Rose, 2020;Rose & Martin, 2012 for further information and details on the set of R2L strategies).Depending on the learners' needs, teachers select, following the sequential order, appropriate strategies from the complete set, or apply it in its entirety.The instructional sequence integrates all the following areas, within the broader scope of developing understanding of the genres of written texts: • the mechanics of decoding, • the contextualised processing involved in comprehension, • techniques for leading meaningful discussion of how written language works, • contextualised grammar and spelling learning, • development of competence in writing, integrating all the learning that is accessed in the reading strategies as well as a set of scaffolded writing activities.
The initial strategy proposed in the R2L cycle is Preparing before Reading: the teacher helps students preview the text they will read before they do so.Rose and Martin (2012) explain two ways teachers need to prepare students (see Table 1).The first is part of common classroom practice, such as engaging learners in a new topic through exploring related objects, experiences or videos and reviewing key terms before reading.The second form of preparation before reading is different from standard practices: the teacher gives the student a step-bystep summary of what happens in the text, using words that they can understand.This is not a standard practice in literacy or CLIL lessons, but it is an essential strategy in the R2L approach.The point of this practice is to enable every student in the class to follow along when, in the next step of the R2L cycle, the text is read aloud in class.Thanks to this kind of preparation, all students are enabled to create a mental model of the text they will read (Woolley, 2011).
The next strategy in the R2L cycle (Rose & Martin, 2012) consists in the teacher guiding pupils to read along while she reads the text aloud.Depending on the length of the text and the learners' needs, the whole text is read, paragraph-by-paragraph and notes are taken.Or else a fragment, such as a single paragraph, is read and the teacher gives preparation for each sentence, reads it aloud, then gives the meaning of key wordings and clues to help students identify them in the text and highlight them.This practice is known as Detailed Reading.When the class have read the text together and pupils have been enabled to understand it in depth, they can work on sentence and word levels using the Intensive Strategies (Table 2).These should be selected depending on the learners' needs and applied in order, so that pupils go from working with larger units of language (sentences) to smaller ones (syllables and letters).
After using the above strategies, learners are quite well prepared to begin writing; the scaffolding for writing in the R2L cycle consists whole-class note-making followed by joint re-writing and finally, independent writing (Table 3).Together, these practices build students' ability for note-making and using their notes to write their own texts (Rose & Martin, 2012).There are connections between R2L and the distinction of three kinds of learning established for effective CLIL lesson objectives and planning in Coyle et al. (2010).In R2L, learners access language of learning as they highlight, take note of and use key academic or conceptual terms in their own writing, during the joint and individual rewriting stages.In addition, and crucially, the students access these key terms in a contextualised way.The context for reading has been built in the Preparing for Reading strategy, through an overview of the whole topic and text, as well as guidance to notice information provided through images, graphic and text features on their book page.Learners are led, from the contextual and background knowledge, to reading the text and gradually focussing on smaller units of language, before focussing on the meaning, morphological form and spelling of key terms.
The contextualisation activities, proposed as part of the systematic, step-by-step organisation of the TLC, also give learners opportunities to take part in scaffolded interaction.It consists of interacting as the teacher "thinking aloud", unpacking the meanings of expressions and phrases in the text.The teacher then interacts with learners asking them to match the meaning descriptions that they hear with the written word or expressions, using language for learning.Additionally, the third component of the language triptych, language through learning is also developed within the TLC.Reconstructing the fragment or sentences from the text in the Sentence making strategy (mentioned above) offers opportunities for students to work together collaboratively, in small groups, and for spontaneous learning where students think of different word orders that can form new sentences or talk about what makes certain word orders correct while others make no sense, leading to pupil-initiated development of language through learning.Pupils progress further with all the three ways of learning throughout the process of reconstructing the text and rewriting the text under the teacher's guidance, up to independently writing new texts in the genre they have been working on.

Context and participants
Over the past decade at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, the group of professors in the Forum for Multilingualism have implemented a series of innovation projects involving collaboration for teaching the R2L approach in both Spanish, our students first language, and English, for the students learning to be specialists in this language (see García-Parejo, this volume).The present article reports on work carried out by students in the English specialisation strand of the degree in Primary Education (grado de Maestro en Educación Primaria).As part of one of the elective courses within the specialisation programme for qualifying as a primary school teacher of English (Mención en Lengua Extranjera -Inglés), focussed on literacy in English as a Foreign Language (EFL), students learn about functional literacy pedagogy.They are introduced to the concept of genre, some of its applications, R2L pedagogy and the TLC.The coursework tasks have included, over several years for different cohorts, learning to use a bespoke lesson planning template for preparing lessons to teach using the R2L approach (Ahern & López Medina, 2021;García-Parejo, 2016;García-Parejo & Ahern, 2019).Section 4 of this article will offer an analysis of a brief -due to space limitations -selection of certain parts of these lesson plans.The students whose work is presented in that section had all agreed by signed consent to the inclusion of their coursework as research data, within the framework of Teaching Innovation Projects on genre pedagogy -specifically, the projects developed during the academic years 2016-174 (34 students) and 2020-21 5 (36 students).

Materials and procedures involved in the training experience
The experiences developed within the course on Teaching EFL Literacy in Primary Education constitute a block of content within the course syllabus, covering the area of planning for literacy teaching.In this part of the course, student teachers need to be familiarised with a set of processes, identified in 2.2.1.Next, section 2.2.2 identifies the materials and procedure followed so that the students to learn how to apply the processes and achieve the ability to plan effectively for teaching reading comprehension and writing following the systematic cycle proposed in R2L.

Processes in student teachers' preparation for literacy teaching
An initial induction is provided within the content block on genre pedagogy and R2L, after student teachers have learnt about the concept of reading literacy and its assessment in the EFL classroom for young learners.In this induction, students become familiar with the functional approach to literacy education.Next, a sequence of activities introduces them to the concept of genre, and they apply this through genre-identification activities.The theoretical principles and origin of the R2L approach are presented to the students, then they work through a set of learning activities to enhance their understanding of the principles, later acting as classroom pupils while the course instructor delivers two complete R2L pedagogical cycles across three class sessions.In this experience, the first genre that is learnt is a Descriptive Report, on the topic of an animal, which belongs to the curriculum area of Natural Science in our context.Next, students work on a fragment of a Narrative, and again follow the R2L cycle.In both cases, the students end the cycle writing their own adapted versions, or new texts, in the selected genres.Throughout the process followed in the experience, the student teachers receive training for the following: • Selecting texts for their future primary school pupils through which they can work towards learning objectives, based on the relevant officially determined curriculum documents, contents and assessment standards.The text selection will form part of a backward design for planning, so it is a step that requires knowledge of genres which enables teachers to identify appropriate texts.• Analysing the selected texts to develop awareness of its characteristics, including the key content words and expressions, as well as the Stages and phases (Rose & Martin, 2012) that comprise the text and its accompanying graphic features, in order to use them as the basis for planning teaching reading comprehension and writing.• Establishing language and content learning aims that the pupils will be able to achieve by reading the text and using it as a model for their own writing.
• Preparing what they can tell pupils to prepare them before reading the text, what they can say to pupils in the Detailed Reading interaction to guide indepth comprehension and note-taking.• Selecting sentences for working on the R2L Intensive Strategies of sentence making, spelling and sentence writing.• Preparing to help pupils of primary education use L2 English for joint reconstruction and joint rewriting, followed by planning the teaching proposal for their pupils' own joint or individual rewriting and independent writing tasks in the primary school classroom.

Materials and student-teacher learning activities
The materials that student teachers use for the content block described above include the following: • Readings and presentations that provide an overview of R2L pedagogy (Rose & Martin, 2012) 2018), illustrating the arrangement of learning activities focussed on the linguistic units of written language, within the communicative context, integrated in the form of the TLC of R2L and its scaffolded interaction cycle; • Text structure exercises for awareness-raising: jigsaw texts; phrase-sorting tasks for identifying lexico-grammatical features by genre (narrative vs. factual); • Adaptations of the R2L Planning Template (García-Parejo, 2016).
The template the students learn to work with leads them to apply a process of genre analysis and transposition of their analysis for setting out in written form all the information they will apply in teaching the R2L lessons.Among its sections, one is designated for planning how to guide learners through scaffolded interaction in the Detailed Reading strategy (for a full explanation, see García-Parejo & Ahern, 2019, pp. 89-92).Students are provided with complete sets of plans that apply the template, which they use as models for their own planning work.In the results section, below, example sections planned by student teachers are provided and discussed.

Analysis: procedure and instruments
The results of the teaching experience described will be analysed in section 4, by exploring evidence of their ability to plan for effective literacy lessons in CLIL primary classrooms.Coursework submitted by students mentioned in the previous section -in particular, in the plans created using the R2L planning template-provides the material for analysis.
The plans were initially assessed for achievement in understanding and applying the skills that were practised during the course to build up the student teachers' understanding of the R2L pedagogy.The student teachers' achievements were manifested in the accurate use of the planning template, leading to adequacy in the teaching unit organisation and in the content that they proposed to work on.The course-internal assessment of these achievements was developed with reference to a consensus-based assessment rubric (García-Parejo, 2018, section 6.1).
In analysing the results of the educational experience for the present article's goals, specifically, the lesson plans developed by the students, reference to the CLIL core methodological principles and criteria for CLIL planning mentioned in the introduction to this article will be made.Based on potential relevance to the present training experience, a selection has been collated from the criteria mentioned in the early proposal by Bertaux et al. (2010) as well as some that were applied in the study by Custodio Espinar (2019; see also Custodio Espinar & García Ramos, 2023) in her validated instrument for CLIL methodological principle integration measurement.The selection is shown in Table 4.

Results
A few representative examples of student teachers' achievements in learning how to create effective teaching plans, as explained in section 3.2, are provided here.The examples also illustrate the compatibility of R2L teaching plans for systematic and practical implementation of CLIL methodological principles and expert guidelines.In commenting on the examples shown, reference to the numbered recommendations shown in Table 4 will be made.
In Fig. 2, the introductory sections of a student teacher's teaching unit reveal several of the CLIL planning skills that were developed: the correct identification of the genre and the purpose of the factual text selected, a classification of the inner and outer planets; also, the school grade in which the curriculum establishes that children need to learn this content about the Solar System, specifically in the area of (Social) Sciences (recommendation 7 in Table 4).Finally, it can be observed how both language and content learning aims are identified in this plan.The grammar objective, in which the verb tense is linked to the communicative purpose of the text, shows the student teacher's grasp of contextualising grammar and truly integrating the language with the content (recommendation 1 in Table 4).The plan also includes suggestions for building context and activating prior knowledge, such as a video to remind learners of what they learnt previously (Fig. 3), (recommendations 2 and 11 in Table 4).In the process of learning to plan, student teachers also create, within their plans, a script for the Detailed Reading strategy (from the R2L pedagogical cycle), as illustrated below in Fig. 4, showing work by student M.L.R.The script is a guide for what the teacher will tell her pupils in class and for interacting with the learners.Firstly, the whole section of text is summed up; next, the teacher previews what the first sentence is about (planned in the "sentence prep" section).Then the teacher reads aloud that sentence, asks about specific words or phrases (the questions in the "cues" section), nominating individual children to respond ensuring that all are praised for their answers; the teacher also briefly elaborates (following the plan in the "elaborations" section) some of the content or language in that sentence, giving extra information that helps the pupils reach the learning objectives established for the lesson and that will be applied using the rewriting and writing strategies (recommendations 2, 3, 4, 6 and 8 in Table 4).This interaction includes explanations of new terms in teacher-guided discussion; and literal, inferential and interpretative meaning is verbalised.Furthermore, the teachers plan how to talk to pupils about the grammatical structures that are pertinent to the text's purposes of classifying and describing, drawing pupils' attention to them so that they may later use these structures in their own writing.The words that are highlighted during the Detailed Reading are for learning to make notes of key expressions, which forms part of the Joint Rewriting proposed in the TLC plans.Thus, the learning strategies of highlighting and taking note of key words and phrases are planned for (recommendation 8 in Table 4).
The examples provided suggest that by developing plans for R2L successfully, the student teachers show that they are capable of meeting the criteria for competence in the core CLIL features.The four Cs are present in the plans, since: • the plans make explicit how the language resources connect to the content by identifying the structures and words in the model text relating them to the topic and purpose (e.g., the present tense is necessary for describing real-world facts like information on the Solar System).• Texts that challenge learners cognitively are the focus of the plans, as they specify the way that scaffolding through teacher-guided interaction can enable all learners to comprehend the model text in depth.• The framing of reading and writing within the disciplines of school subjects and linking texts to their communicative purpose integrates the culture component: disciplinary traditions and goals determine the genres relevant to their study, such as recounting events in History, or explaining and expressing procedures in Science.
As to the difficulties student teachers find when learning to use the template for elaborating their plans, the most frequently encountered ones are: • Difficulty with genre analysis: misidentifying the genre of the text that they select, for instance student teachers may label an informative genre as a narrative, or a description as an explanation.Identifying genres can be problematic for various reasons.This is especially the case with texts in school textbooks because they usually form macro-genres (Hyland, 2002) with many small sections expressing differing genres; and also because genre analysis requires identifying the overall purpose of a text, which includes phases that have different purposes.• Challenges with capturing the purpose of the plan for scaffolding comprehension in the Detailed Reading strategy.Students frequently include questions that digress from the text content in their interaction plans; they are likely to be influenced by the idea of "conversation practice" that often forms part of traditional EFL lessons.The shift to understanding the specific use of interaction to focus on what is expressed in the model text that they plan to use requires the student teachers to re-think the role of the teacher from that of initiating open conversation to guiding comprehension.
All in all, despite variations in how well they managed to perform in the planning process, the student teachers progressed in understanding R2L as an alternative to more traditional educational approaches to reading and writing.The tasks that they developed entailed gaining experience in reading and selecting texts for use with primary school EFL learners within CLIL programmes.This process required consideration of the quality of texts that they encountered and practice in identifying their main communicative purpose and genre.

Innovative features of the experience
The training carried out through the course is innovative in several ways.Some of the principle innovative features are the following: • R2L was originally developed in Australia through David Rose's work with practising (in-service) teachers.The existing materials and proposals for training were not specifically designed for pre-service or trainees.These aspects entail the need for adjusting the explanations and activities that form part of the training in R2L pedagogy.The genre identification tasks are simplified to focus only on a small selection of genres, including the most commonly learnt ones: a procedural genre (instructions, recipes, protocols; texts that pupils in primary are very familiar with thanks to teachers' discourse as well as textbook materials); story genres including Narrative and Personal Recount7 .• As indicated, the training described is provided within the specialisation in EFL teaching methodology.Using R2L for developing literacy in a foreign language and within the CLIL approach is another novel feature in this course.
Considerations that need to be addressed in this area are the possible use of the mother tongue, by way of pedagogical translanguaging, i.e., exploring the principles of when learners will benefit from switching from the target language of the literacy learning back into the community language (in our case, Spanish).• The main innovation that is implemented in the course in terms of learning materials, however, is the template for R2L unit planning (Ahern, 2014), which has been updated and adapted several times based on on-going revision processes.

Future directions for R2L in teacher education
Put simply, CLIL requires teachers to establish learning aims for their pupils and activities that lead them to understand the concepts of the topic that they are working on, while also acquiring the language.The topic will be determined in connection to the school subject, and learning will simultaneously expand and deepen pupils' competence in the language for expressing, debating, explaining or describing this content following the discursive norms and practices of Ahern, A. (2023).Learning to plan for CLIL with the Reading to Learn approach.An experience in initial teacher training.Didacticae, (14), 107-125.https://doi.org/10.1344/did.2023.14.107-125 123 the corresponding discipline or field of knowledge.Successful CLIL entails that on completing secondary school, learners will be able to report on experiments like scientists, describe animals like biologists or explain causes and effects in history like historians, all in both of the languages of schooling; this is shown in the writing for university entrance exams and other high-stakes tests by high-performing students.Clearly, this kind of mastery has to be built starting in the primary, and even pre-primary years if learners are to be expected to fully develop it by the end of their secondary school studies.
As stated by Llinares and McCabe (2023), assuming that a central pillar of CLIL is the teaching of content and language in integration, this educational approach requires theoretical models that conceive of content and language as two sides of the same coin, models that both content teachers and language teachers can apply.Language is the means by which teaching and learning take place.Through language we construct representations of the world, relate to others and convey ideas.Aligned with these facts are the essential elements attributed to CLIL by experts: planning for scaffolded interaction, challenging learners with higher-order thinking skills, valuing differing perspectives and cultural practices.
The R2L approach shares with these CLIL principles several salient points of contact that show how both approaches can be highly compatible and lead to powerful synergies.The value of building foundational literacy teaching abilities during ITE programmes is unquestionable at this point, considering the lifelong asset that strong literacy competencies constitute.Teachers who are charged with the responsibility of introducing children in primary school to the enjoyment reading and writing offer, as well as being the key to social and democratic participation in society, now face a fast-changing context where the role of literacy is evolving due to the dizzying speed of evolution of new ICTs and artificial intelligence.The R2L approach provides, as observed herein, a good starting point for teacher education in this area (García-Parejo & Ahern, 2019).
The multimodal nature of written and visual texts, as well as the new kinds of supports for the genres that arise through these ICTs, provide many new avenues for exploration in literacy education.Teaching innovations relevant to the current context, when artificial intelligence has become widely accessible, will require new perspectives such as linking the foundational literacy skills to the augmented possibilities such tools can provide.Meanwhile, in work on bi and multilingual literacies, the need for strong teacher preparation is also becoming more acute, as the forces of globalisation lead us into new kinds of educational settings with new demands.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.The Reading to Learn teaching-learning cycle.3

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. Introductory information in student teacher S.G.'s R2L unit plan for learning the genre of Classifying Report.

Figure 3 .
Figure 3. Plan for Preparing before Reading strategy.

Figure 4 .
Figure 4. Detailed Reading plans for Descriptive Report: The Moon.

Table 3 .
R2L re-writing and writing strategies.
; • A video available through the Victoria TESOL website (also on YouTube) showing a cycle of young learners' literacy work as they follow the TLC developed by the Sydney School (VicTESOL, n.d.); • Visuals and graphics designed by David Rose and published in a set of teacher training booklets on R2L (