In the last 10 years, CLIL research has developed from a focus on students' general language proficiency to the study of their academic language proficiency, thus gradually shifting to a deeper analysis and understanding of how content and language are learnt in integration (e.g. Nikula et al., 2016). However, this research interest and the insights derived from it has not been sufficiently translated into specific and concrete training and experiences for teachers and students. This is partly due to a lack of collaboration between content and language teachers at schools, where most teachers address language from the perspective of their own discipline or not at all (in the case of many content teachers).
As part of a broader project, this paper presents some of the results obtained from a joint collaborative project between content teachers, language (English) teachers and applied linguists in a CLIL school. After being teamed up in pairs (content and language) teaching the same students, the participating teachers were trained on the model of Cognitive Discourse Functions (Dalton-Puffer, 2013) and were asked to apply it in joint activities in the content and English class. The students' production in those activities was assessed by content and language teachers (using comparative judgement), and the results were discussed in monthly focus groups. The students themselves also judged their own and their classmates' texts and discussed the results with their teachers. Drawing on previous studies applying Maton's (2013, 2014) specialization (Morton & Llinares, forthcoming) and semantic dimensions (Llinares & Nashaat-Sobhy, 2021), we compared teachers' judgements and students' judgements of the same texts, the result of a joint task between biology and English teachers, and the subsequent discussion carried out between teachers and researchers (on teachers' judgments) and between teachers and students (on students' judgements). Preliminary results show that teachers emphasized both epistemic relations (knowledge, skills, and procedures) and social relations (intrinsic or cultivated aspects of the learner) in their judgments, while students placed greater emphasis on epistemic relations, leading to differences in their rankings of the texts.
Dalton-Puffer, C. (2013). A construct of cognitive discourse functions for conceptualising content-language integration in CLIL and multilingual education. European Journal of Applied Linguistics, 1(2), 216–253.
Llinares, A. & Nashaat-Sobhy, N. (2021) What is an ecosystem? Defining science in primary school CLIL contexts, Language Teaching for Young Learners, 3 (2): 337– 362. https://doi.org/10.1075/ltyl.20010.lli
Maton, K. (2013) Making semantic waves: A key to cumulative knowledge-building, Linguistics and Education, 24(1): 8–22. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2012.11.008
Maton, K. (2014) Knowledge and knowers: Towards a realist sociology of education. Routledge.
Nikula, M., Dafouz, E., Moore, P. & Smit, U. (2016). Conceptualizing Integration in CLIL and Multilingual Education. Multilingual Matters.
Morton, T. & Llinares, A. (forthcoming) Building Teachers' Knowledge of Cognitive Discourse Functions (CDFs) to Integrate Content and Language: A Semantic Analysis. In Ballinger, S., Fielding, R. & Tedick, D. (Eds.). International Perspectives on Teacher Education for Immersion and Content-Based Contexts. Multilingual Matters.
