This paper builds on previous analyses of a longitudinal corpus of student texts from public bilingual schools in an upper-middle class area of Madrid, Spain (Whittaker & McCabe 2020). The corpus is part of the UAM-CLIL research project, which has collected data across the years of schooling from year 6 (11-12 year-olds) through year 10 (15-16 year-olds). Using written and spoken prompts/tasks, we elicited cognitive discourse functions (CDFs) (categorize, define, describe, explain, explore, evaluate, report; Dalton-Puffer 2013) for tracing students' ability in a high-immersion English-medium program to express these functions over time.
The CDF evaluate involves learners in "[m]aking judgments based on criteria and standards" (Krathwohl 2002: 215). We use the Appraisal framework (Martin & White, 2005), rooted in the interpersonal metafunction of language, to analyse the data for evaluative judgements of events, people and phenomena, an axiological positioning which students need to support with appropriate criteria. These are field-specific, and draw on the ideational metafunction, through which experience is constructed/expressed. Our analysis applies the concept of coupling of ideational and interpersonal meaning (Martin 2000) to trace students' ability to evaluate historical events/characters with justifications that display knowledge of history.
Previous results from the longitudinal study (Whittaker & McCabe, 2020) demonstrated development in students' texts through an increasing inclusion of couplings of evaluations and disciplinary appropriate justifications. In the cross-sectional study reported on here, we draw on recently collected data of year 10 texts, elicited using the same procedures and similar prompts, from a public school in a different socio-economic area of the Madrid region, as well as on written data collected from both schools in Spanish from students in both the high-immersion track (where history is learnt through English) and the low-immersion track (where history is taught in Spanish). We provide comparisons across the areas, languages and tracks, using the same Appraisal analysis, leading to insights into how students develop their ability to express the CDF evaluate in different educational contexts. These insights lead to implications of how teachers can focus attention on language in CLIL classrooms.
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): 216-253. DOI: 10.1515/eujal-2013-0011
Krathwohl, D. (2002) A revision of Bloom's taxonomy: an overview. Theory into Practice, 41(4), 212-218.
Martin, J.R. (2000). Beyond Exchange: appraisal systems in English. In S. Hunston & G. Thompson (eds.) Evaluation in text: Authorial stance and the construction of discourse. Oxford: OUP.
Martin, J. R., and P. R. R. White. 2005. Language of evaluation: Appraisal in English. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Whittaker, R. & McCabe, A. (2020). Expressing evaluation across disciplines in primary and secondary CLIL writing. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2020.1798869
