Rachel Whittaker

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.

Writing and speaking in the history class: A comparative analysis of CLIL and first language contexts

This paper presents a comparative analysis of the language used by CLIL secondary school students of history and that of students following the same syllabus in their first language (Spanish). The data consists of spoken and written production: a whole-class end-of-topic summary session and short compositions by the same students on the same topic. Using a Systemic-Functional approach (Halliday 2004), we analyse a selection of features of the students’ language in the two contexts. We focus on their expression of content: processes, participants, circumstances and clause complexes (Halliday’s ideational function of language) and their use of modality (the interpersonal function). The results report differences between the two groups in the realization of the two functions.

Working on Literacy in CLIL/Bilingual Contexts: Reading to Learn and Teacher Development

This paper describes a project implement- ing a literacy programme based on a linguistic ap- proach to teaching reading and writing, found es- pecially useful for subject classes taught through a foreign language. The programme, Reading to Learn (Rose, 2014; Rose & Martin, 2012), based on an analy- sis of the genres of different subjects, their language features and the diffi culties these pose learners, offers teachers an explicit and detailed method to approach text comprehension/production. The paper includes examples of texts from late primary to mid-secondary content classes as analysed and used by teachers, stu- dent texts, and reactions to the pedagogy.

Genre and appraisal in CLIL history texts: Developing the voice of the historian

This chapter offers a perspective on texts written in a CLIL class, highlighting the role of the interpersonal meanings covered by the appraisal framework (Martin & White 2005) in constructing the different genres of history, which are not only factual, but also include assigning value and indicating point of view. An analysis of appraisal in an 11,000-word longitudinal corpus of CLIL secondary student writing shows how texts are more or less successful in their selection of features from the appraisal systems as they respond to prompts, the higher-rated texts creating a more appropriate voice for the genre (Coffin 2006). Awareness of the categories of interpersonal meanings can allow teachers to make genre expectations explicit, helping improve student writing.