Introducing Nutrition Education in the English Language Subject’s Curriculum: Training Students’ English Skills through the Acquisition of Nutritional Knowledge

Abstract

[eng] Obesity and diseases related to bad eating habits are increasing at warp speed in our societies. The situation calls for raising students’ awareness on this issue, since it affects directly to their own health. Indeed, an unhealthy diet can even interfere with the proper development of students’ academic performance. Schools need to develop strategies in order to face disinformation and reinforce this knowledge on nutrition that will be fundamental for students to live a healthier lifestyle and to improve their academic performance. To do so, this work suggests to implement inside the English subject’s curriculum of 1st of Bachiller students an interdisciplinary project dealing with nutrition education as well as English language acquisition. The project will follow a similar method to CLIL, and it will be carried out by the English and the Science departments, taking place in the second trimester and lasting eleven weeks. The main aims are to learn good eating habits and what the different meals should include in terms of foods and nutrients, to become familiar with healthy recipes, to learn how to read food labels, and to inspire critical thinking towards students’ own eating habits. At the same time, this project will mainly encourage the training of their oral skills in the English language, the acquisition of new vocabulary, grammatical structures and the development of the rest of the linguistic skills (reading, listening, and writing). Furthermore, the development of most of the seven key competences will take place.