This paper investigates knowledge communication and transferability in the written performances of CLIL students in two school subjects. 'Interdisciplinary transfer' is considered a dimension of subject literacy; one that contributes to quality education and enables students to become lifelong learners (Beacco et al., 2015). Previous studies have compared CLIL students' performance across subjects (e.g., Evnitskaya & Dalton-Puffer, 2020) but no studies have focused on the same students' performance in a curricular and a non-curricular topic. In this study, we analyse and compare CLIL secondary students' texts who study several curricular content subjects through English (History, Geography, Biology, Art, Technology, Physical Education or Music) in addition to English as a foreign language subject (EFL). The students write academic texts on topics in the content subjects that they can draw on when composing texts for the EFL class. The texts from the content subjects represent 'pedagogised knowledge' (Maton, 2014) and the texts from EFL represent 'common-sense' world knowledge. In both topics, the students' answers were triggered by a series of prompts that elicited the full range of cognitive discourse functions (CDFs)-linguistic realizations of cognitive processes in academic contexts-Dalton-Puffer, 2013): define, describe, compare, explain, evaluate, explore, report. We interpret students' performance through the lens of specialization codes-one of the tools in Legitimation Code Theory, LCT (Maton, 2014)-to consider not only how students epistemically relate (ER+) to an object of study (knowledge code; e.g., use of academic terms, structural appropriateness, and grammatical accuracy), but also how their individuality and individual skills help them to socially relate (SR+) to the target object (knower code: e.g., use of authorial voice and appraisal), for which we used Martin & White's (2005) appraisal theory.
References
Beacco, J. C., Fleming, M., Goullier, F., Thürmann, E., Vollmer, H., & Sheils, J. (2016). The language dimension in all subjects: A Handbook for Curriculum Developmentand Teacher Training. Council of Europe: www.coe.int/t/dg4/linguistic/Source/Handbook-Scol_final_E N.pdf
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), 1-38.
Evnitskaya, N., & Dalton-Puffer, C. (2020). Cognitive discourse functions in CLIL classrooms:Eliciting and analysing students' oral categorizations in science and history. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, DOI: 10.1080/13670050.2020.1804824
Martin, J. R., & White, P. R. (2005). The language of evaluation (Vol. 2). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Maton, K. (2014). Knowledge and knowers: Towards a realist sociology of education. Routledge.
