While researchers agree that the integration of content and language goals is the operative principle behind any successful CLIL programme (Mehisto et al. 2008; Nikula et al. 2016; Coyle & Meyer 2021), there is an ongoing debate over how we can best conceptualise this integration for practical use. A promising way of doing this is to incorporate subject literacy education into CLIL teaching and pedagogical design. An understanding of subject literacy as a social practice embedded in the use of "literacy skills and knowledge, for socially constructed purposes, within specific sociocultural contexts" (Green 2020: 13) integrates both the procedural knowledge that constitutes content matter as well as the discipline-specific academic language that will represent this content. Yet the content teachers that are typically involved in CLIL programmes are hardly ever trained in subject literacy education or foreign language teaching methodology (Hüttner et al. 2013), which makes the task of translating a content and language integrated model into CLIL practice especially demanding. This becomes even more challenging at Austrian technical colleges, where CLIL programmes typically focus on highly-specialised technical content subjects in which cognitive demand is high in terms of both content and language. To support teachers at this school type in implementing an integrated CLIL model in practice, this dissertation project aims to develop a CLIL lesson planning tool that operationalises subject literacy for the context of technical colleges. Following a design-based research (DBR) approach, the tool is designed in close collaboration with two novice CLIL teachers and tested in their respective subjects recycling technology and control engineering. Both the process and the outcome of this collaborative project offer new insights into CLIL teacher professional development, CLIL lesson planning, and vocational CLIL. The lesson planning tool itself holds the potential to improve CLIL practice in the often neglected context of vocational CLIL, thus effectively bridging the gap between theory and practice.
References:
Coyle, D. & Meyer, O. (2021). Beyond CLIL: Pluriliteracies Teaching for Deeper Learning. Cambridge University Press.
Green, S. (2020). Scaffolding Academic Literacy with Low-Proficiency Users of English. Palgrave Macmillan.
Hüttner, J., Dalton-Puffer, C. & Smit, U. (2013). The Power of Beliefs: Lay Theories and their Influence on the Implementation of CLIL Programmes. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 16(3), 267–284.
Mehisto, P., Marsh, D. & Frigols, M. J. (2008). Uncovering CLIL. Content and language integrated learning in bilingual and multilingual education. Macmillan.
Nikula, T., E. Dafouz, P. Moore & Smit U. (eds.) (2016). Conceptualising Integration in CLIL and Multilingual Education. Multilingual Matters.
