VietTESOL International Convention 2025

Making the sometimes dry and complex SDGs come alive for university students is a serious challenge for any English language teacher. To do this effectively in English requires a robust and carefully thought-out CLIL approach; one that utilizes a wide range of strategies and accommodates diverse learning styles. A course of this kind must be designed to make the sustainable goals resonate at a personal level and motivate students to overcome the vocabulary and cognitive obstacles that they will encounter. CLIL teachers of the SDGs have the advantage of a vast array of sources for what is a highly interdisciplinary topic. These include informational and inspirational-type videos made for students of every age and level as well as hundreds of highly informative and fun-to-use and vocabulary-rich infographics. On the other hand, the massive amount of information available, some of which includes specialized vocabulary, can result in a serious overload for students and as such, the instructor must be able to recalibrate assignments and tasks. This presentation is based on the presenter's decade-long efforts to tackle and overcome these problems while creating an SDG-based course that combines all of the skills, especially reading and listening. It does this by turning each of the core SDGs into mini projects that are carefully scaffolded and utilize a wide range of carefully selected up-to-date EFL-friendly websites and videos. Finally too, it incorporates, when necessary, selected L1 texts and information while still maintaining the core principles of the CLIL approach.