Ana Llinares

Written discourse development in CLIL at secondary school

This article presents a study of written development in English as a foreign language produced in a content and language integrated learning (CLIL) environment. The texts analysed, from history classes, were collected annually over the four-year obligatory junior secondary education program from the same students (aged 12 to 16), in two state schools in Madrid, Spain. The ability to produce coherent texts and the appropriate management of the nominal group, or noun phrase, to create disciplinary registers are key skills for academic writing. With the purpose of identifying the linguistic resources used to create coherence and appropriate register in the CLIL students’ written texts, all the nominal groups in the corpus were analysed in terms of recoverability of the elements they referred to, further classifying the referential elements into different types. Finally, the structure of the nominal groups was analysed for pre- and post-modification. The results show development in the control of textual resources, as well as some increase in nominal group complexity, over the four years. The study suggests that CLIL settings, which focus primarily on the learning of content, provide suitable contexts in which to develop written discourse, since the students can draw on a solid knowledge base from which to create their text. Students need to be given the opportunity to construct scaffolded but longer and more autonomous texts in the required genres, an ability which is inextricably linked to academic success in the content area.

Historical explanations as situated practice in content and language integrated learning

This article examines secondary history content and language integrated learning (CLIL) students’ production of historical explanations in two discursive contexts: classroom discussions and individual interviews. Using data from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid CLIL corpus we combine a quantitative and qualitative methodology to examine the lexico‐grammatical resources and the interactional competences used in the construction of explanations in both contexts. This combined approach allows us to describe the use of academic speech functions in CLIL as a situated practice, and to explore the affordances and constraints of different participation frameworks for their production. The results show that explanation sequences were produced in different ways in the two contexts: in the interviews, CLIL students produced longer explanations and used a wider range of lexico‐grammatical features. The results of the qualitative analysis suggest that differences in interactional behaviour may account for these differences in language production. Overall, the study provides evidence that what CLIL learners can be said to ‘know’, both in terms of content and language, is strongly influenced by the situated practices in which such knowledge is produced.

Integration in CLIL: a proposal to inform research and successful pedagogy

Research on content and language integrated learning (CLIL) has expanded substantially in the last 10 years. While research interests have predominantly focused on language learning outcomes and the comparison between CLIL and English as a foreign language (EFL) students’ competence in the foreign language, recent studies have called for the need to focus on how language and content are best learnt in integration. In order to understand integration in its full scope, there are two main variables that need to be carefully investigated: the functions of language in different subjects (subject literacies and genres) and the way language and content interact in a variety of classroom interactional activities. This article presents a model for the understanding of integration in CLIL drawing on the combination of systemic-functional linguistic (SFL) and classroom interactional approaches to language and meaning construction. As shown in previous studies, CLIL teachers and learners need to be aware of the characteristics of different genres within their academic disciplines and the lexico-grammatical resources required to participate in those genres. CLIL learners are expected to use these linguistic resources in a second/foreign language to express academic knowledge (ideational function), but also to appraise that knowledge and participate socially in the classroom (interpersonal function), and to produce and distinguish between written and oral texts (textual function). However, the SFL model alone does not offer the complete picture of how content and language are learnt in integration. In addition to knowing what is integrated, it is equally necessary to understand how integration unfolds in the actual context of the classroom. For this second purpose, the study suggests a combination of SFL with other approaches that consider interaction as a key element in the learning process. This process can be studied by identifying students’ language and content engagement when they participate in different classroom activities.

A genre approach to the effect of academic questions on CLIL students’ language production

This paper presents an analysis of teachers’ questions and students’ responses in content and language integrated learning (CLIL) classes of history. Through the combined application of genre theory and a typology of CLIL teacher academic questions, the study aims at contributing to the understanding of how CLIL students use the foreign language to express academic meanings. The data are part of the UAM-CLIL project, which focuses on the systemic-functional analysis of CLIL students’ language production. In this paper, we analyze class discussions on various topics in two secondary schools. These discussions were carried out at the end of a topic and followed a prompt that aimed at triggering participation in different history genres: recount, account, explanation and argument. The aim of the study is twofold: first, the academic questions used by the teachers are classified in relation to the genre triggered by the prompt; second, we analyze the length and complexity of the students’ responses. The results show that the teachers did not always ask the questions related to the prompt. In fact, they frequently used questions for facts, which usually triggered shorter and less complex responses than other types.

Students’ use of evaluative language in L2 English to talk and write about history in a bilingual education programme

ABSTRACT This article reports on a four-year longitudinal study which investigates students’ use of evaluative language in English as a second language (L2) to talk and write about history in a bilingual education programme. We focus on how four students use linguistic resources to adopt a stance to the content they are learning and develop an authoritative voice, for which they need to use evaluative language, in which people, actions, events and processes are appraised. We combine quantitative analysis of a spoken and written corpus with a qualitative analysis of students’ spoken production in one-to-one interviews. Quantitative findings showed similarities and differences in the use of evaluative language among individual students both cross-sectionally and over the four years of study. Moreover, qualitative comparative analysis of the production of two of these students, who were differently rated by their teachers in their English skills, showed clear differences in their abilities to use linguistic resources to construct an appropriate ‘historian’s’ voice in the L2.

Speech function analysis to explore CLIL students’ spoken language for knowledge construction

This chapter focuses on the register variable of tenor within systemic functional linguistics (SFL) to examine spoken interaction involving secondary CLIL history learners in two contexts: one-to-one interviews with a researcher, and role-plays with peers. Tenor refers to the role relationship between interactants, and its impact on language use. We adapt speech function analyses developed by Eggins and Slade (1997) for ordinary conversation to settings in which CLIL learners jointly construct aspects of content knowledge in one subject, history. The findings show that the negotiation and roles assigned to participants impacted on the ways the learners managed to construct history content knowledge. We argue that speech function analysis can throw light on how role relationships in spoken interaction can create or restrict affordances for the expression of content knowledge in CLIL.

Students’ motivation for content and language integrated learning and the role of programme intensity

ABSTRACTThe study of motivation in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) contexts has hitherto one-sidedly been concerned with motivation to learn the foreign language, without regard for...