A challenge with implementing CLIL at tertiary regards the cultivation of subject specific language and disciplinary literacies that content-students need to "language about" complex content-notions, without requiring foreign language instructors to step beyond their comfort zones. This paper reports on a university-level course on "Scientific English" piloted at an Italian university which sought to bridge the interface between "soft-" and "hard-" CLIL by developing students' productive disciplinary discourses. Fifteen students from different STEM degree courses (Chemistry, Computer Science and Mathematics), across different years of study and varying degrees of English competency (B1 to C1) followed, and successfully completed the course. At this level, students were already familiar with the basic characteristics of "academic texts", e.g. the use of the passive voice, registers and genres, structuring reports into sections, etc., all of which they had learnt prior to university and were experiencing regularly as consumers of tertiary-level textbooks. Yet STEM-colleagues lament "poor language" in students' theses, even in L1. Clearly, years of receiving academic discourse as input does not guarantee successful productive academic literacy at output. Productive academic and disciplinary literacy was therefore the objective of this Scientific English course. However, STEM-students, like their STEM-professors, rarely recognize that "language", something we naturally do, is also scientifically researched and, just like STEM-research, language-research delineates objective ways for understanding language, insights which, in turn, empowers us to use language to our advantage. The course thus aimed to provide students objective ways to consider language (Ting, 2022), helping them appreciate that their ability to produce academic discourse, be it well-polished oral presentations or effectively-written texts, is as important as the costly laboratory equipment and computational systems they use and value. Introducing students to Cummins' (1984) research and the notions of BICS and CALP equipped everyone a STEM-like, objective way to "language about language". Thereafter, interdisciplinary articles from high-impact research journals (Nature, Science and PNAS) which merged chemistry, artificial intelligence and statistics, were used to contextualize language-focused "soft-CLIL" instruction regarding notions such as the academic word list, word-tiers, cognitive discourse functions (Dalton-Puffer, 2013), textual coherence through anaphoric referencing, given-new organization, word morphology, etc. This provided STEM-students an "academic-discourse lens" for poring through discipline-specific discourses about discipline-specific research: students entered "hard-CLIL" without requiring the EFL-instructor to venture far from her comfort zone. Improvements in the textual quality of written reports and oral presentations will be presented, alongside data showing how STEM-students learnt to language about language, becoming increasingly more able to generate academic texts for showing off their productive disciplinary literacy skills.
Cummins, J. 1984. Bilingualism and Special Education: Issues in Assessment and Pedagogy. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Dalton-Puffer, C. (2013). A construct of cognitive discourse functions for conceptualising content-language integration in CLIL and multilingual education. EuJAL, 1(2), 216-253.
Ting, Y.L.T. 2022. Tertiary STEM and EMI: where EFL and content meet to potentiate each other. ELTJ, 76(2), 194-207. https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/ccab093.
