In this presentation, we will argue that many original definitions about the subject matter based on the description in group work elicit a number of layers of understanding to generate their own co-constructed ideas. We will discuss what the grounds are before students co-construct knowledge.
This study explores how various discourse moves elicited thick descriptions of concepts in a content-driven Cultural Studies CLIL course at a private university in Japan. Whilst there is insightful research on CLIL classroom discourse, in the context of Japan, studies on classroom discourse in content-driven courses are still scant. The study employs a cognitive discourse approach and investigates how students' interaction in group work in a content-driven CLIL classroom enhanced cognitive engagement and promoted the construction of knowledge.
The data were taken from the CLIL component of a compulsory course at a Japanese university where EAP was taught in the first term, and in the second term, a Cultural Studies course was delivered with the ultimate objective of students researching an area of Japanese pop culture. The students were science majors, and their level of English was around C1 (CEFR).
The data were collected from sixteen students discussing 'robots and humans in society' and working on creating a definition of robots in group work. The audio data of students' group discussions were analyzed with the two-layered analytical framework designed for this study. The first layer was Cognitive Discourse Functions (CDF) (Dalton-Puffer, 2013) to examine what students communicated, and the second layer was discourse moves (Eggins & Slade, 1997; Pastrana, Llinares, & Pascual, 2018) to look into how they communicated with each other. Finally, we examined the relationship between the two to find out how CDFs were elicited through the discourse.
The findings of this study show that students used various CDFs to achieve the defining task, and these CDFs were elicited by different types of discourse moves. It was observed that the group discussion developed in three steps: brainstorming by describing and categorizing, critical evaluation, and exploration by expanding on a previous speaker's contribution. Through these three stages, the students' use of various strategies of describing seemed to help them evaluate and build on each other's ideas to conceptualize the general term of robots. This leads to expanding feedback (Llinares, Morton, & Whittaker, 2012) for dialogic exchanges and further development of co-construction of knowledge.
It was observed that the science majors discussed the descriptions of robots and human beings and defined them using their own original definitions rather than scientific ones, this course being a Cultural Studies course.
References
Dalton-Puffer, C. (2013). A construct of cognitive discourse functions for conceptualizing content-language integration in CLIL and multilingual education. EuJAL 1(2).
Eggins, S., & Slade, D. (1997). Analysing casual conversation. London: Cassell.
Llinares, A., Morton, T., & Whittaker, R. (2012). The roles of language in CLIL. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pastrana, A., Llinares, A., & Pascual, I. (2018). Students' language use for co-construction of knowledge in CLIL group-work activities: a comparison with L1 settings. Z Erziehungswiss 21, 49–70.
