The objective of this study is to analyze how Secondary Education students argue in different languages in the field of Natural Sciences when a minority language is the language of instruction. Arguments are becoming increasingly common in science curricula (Polias, 2016). According to the Pluriliteracies Teaching for Deeper Learning (PTDL) approach, "arguing science" is one of the four domains students need to master in order to become experts in the subject specific literacy (Meyer & Coyle, 2017). Cognitive Discourse Functions (CDF) have been defined as the integration between cognitive and linguistic processes, as the CDFs can be understood as the crystallization of cognitive-linguistic patterns of some situations which are very common in the learning process, such as arguing (Dalton-Puffer, 2013, 2016). Content and language integration (Llinares et al., 2012) remains a challenge in multilingual education (Cenoz, 2015). A total of 70 students (age range 13-14) from 3 schools participated in this study. Data collection was conducted in the subject of Natural Sciences, a subject taught in Basque in the three schools. Students covered a regular school unit aimed at critically taking a stance on renewable energies, in which focus is mainly placed on subject specific content. Each participant was asked to produce 6 written texts: 2 in Basque, 2 in Spanish and 2 in English. One in each language before working on the content and the remaining 3 texts right after the unit. The written texts were analyzed following Toulmin's (1958) argument's pattern. The preliminary results from the pre-test seem to indicate that students produce arguments in the three languages using similar argumentation patterns across the three languages. Those arguments are comprised of claims and data. However, few students use warrants or rebuttal structures in their argumentation. The first analysis of the post-test revealed that after covering the unit there does not seem to be a significant improvement in students' patterns of argumentation. This leads us to the conclusion that attention should be placed on "both the cognitive structure of the content and the language used to express and demonstrate understanding" (Coyle and Meyer, 2021:81).
Cenoz, J. (2015). Content-based instruction and content and language integrated learning: the same or different?. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 28(1), 8-24.
Coyle, D., & Meyer, O. (2021). Beyond CLIL: Pluriliteracies Teaching for Deeper Learning. Cambridge University Press.
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.
Dalton-Puffer, C. (2016). Cognitive Discourse Functions: Specifying an Integrative Interdisciplinary Construct. In Nikula et al (2016), Conceptualising Integration in CLIL and Multilingual Education.
Llinares, A., Morton, T., and Whittaker, R. (2012). The roles of languages in CLIL. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Meyer, O., & Coyle, D. (2017). Pluriliteracies Teaching for Learning: conceptualizing progression for deeper learning in literacies development. European Journal of Applied Linguistics.
Polias, J. (2016). Apprenticing Students into Science: Doing, Talking, and Writing Scientifically. Melbourne: Lexis Education.
Toulmin, S. (1958). The Uses of Argument. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
