Tom Morton

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.

Knowledge construction, meaning-making and interaction in CLIL science classroom communities of practice

This paper draws on Wengers model of community of practice to present preliminary findings on how processes of negotiation of meaning and identity formation occur in knowledge construction, meaning-making and interaction in two secondary Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) science classrooms. It uses a multimodal conversation analysis methodology to provide detailed analyses of how teachers and students use talk-in-interaction and other semiotic resources to build and maintain their communities of practice. The data come from two CLIL classrooms in Spain in the same curricular area (biology) but which differ in geographical and sociolinguistic context (Barcelona and Madrid), and in terms of age, level of secondary education and pedagogical approach. The findings show the complex patterns of participation and reification as teachers and learners use different linguistic and other resources to make meaning. The paper argues that a combination of Wengers meso-level practice model and micro-level multimodal conversation analysis is highly effective in elucidating how learning and identity formation are accomplished in CLIL classrooms. It also suggests that the efforts to understand classroom processes and language use in CLIL classrooms can be strengthened by forging links between CLIL research and the classroom discourse work across different disciplines.

Personal Practical Knowledge and Identity in Lesson Planning Conferences on a Pre-Service TESOL Course.

This article reports a study of the discourse of shared lesson planning sessions in the early stages of a pre-service TESOL certificate course. The study focuses on ‘lesson planning conferences’ (LPCs), in which a teacher educator and a group of student teachers worked on one student teacher’s lesson plan. It describes the discursive practices through which lesson plans emerged and through which student teachers constructed personal practical knowledge and identity as they negotiated the process of becoming members of the community of practice of English language teachers. The study revealed the LPCs to be a dynamic and recursive process in which problems of instruction emerged and solutions were suggested. While the teacher educators produced more meanings related to personal practical knowledge, the student teachers had a substantial share in the discursive resources with which meanings were exchanged. The analysis also shows how participants engaged with the practice of planning for teaching through such discursive acts as producing directives, proposing actions, evaluating, articulating teaching principles and imagining classroom events.The article argues that — in spite of some limitations — shared lesson planning is a promising strategy for the construction of novice language teachers’ personal practical knowledge and professional identities.

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.