Triangulated teaching of the CLIL method, geoforensics and educational comic strips

Abstract

The proposed paper offers a model for teaching English through CLIL, incorporating educational comic strips and geoforensics. This triangulation presented aims to achieve multiple goals: to engage students multimodally in understanding a wide range of geological research topics, to demonstrate that the field of criminal forensics can be a challenge even for beginners in science and linguistics, and to show that language learning through scientific comics reduces cognitive effort. In other words, English serves as a linguistic link between geological knowledge and the coded language of geoforensics, with the educational comic strips as an artistic form that makes knowledge acquisition affectively pleasant and free from cognitive pressure. Although educational comics are popular in teaching worldwide, they have not yet been used as a teaching practice in natural and technical sciences at our University. Therefore, when creating them for the needs of the Faculty of Mining and Geology, we approached the selection of topics and their comic adaptation with particular caution. For clarity, the paper is divided into five sections: (1) introductory considerations, (2) the CLIL method and teaching materials, (3) geoforensics, (4) educational comics, and (5) conclusion. In the final discussion, it is emphasized that the mentioned innovative technique was not an end in itself, but an effort to combine linguistic, scientific, and artistic knowledge in a useful way through teaching materials, all the while opening the possibility for multidisciplinary teaching models to pave the way for new practices, far broader and more beneficial than the established traditional teaching methods.