Conceptualising Integration in CLIL and Multilingual Education (Bilingual Education and Bilingualism) - Hardcover

Tarja Nikula

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1783096136 ISBN 13: 9781783096138

Publisher: Multilingual Matters, 2016

Synopsis

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is a form of education that combines language and content learning objectives, a shared concern with other models of bilingual education. While CLIL research has often addressed learning outcomes, this volume focuses on how integration can be conceptualised and investigated. Using different theoretical and methodological approaches, ranging from socioconstructivist learning theories to systemic functional linguistics, the book explores three intersecting perspectives on integration concerning curriculum and pedagogic planning, participant perceptions and classroom practices. The ensuing multidimensionality highlights that in the inherent connectedness of content and language, various institutional, pedagogical and personal aspects of integration also need to be considered.

About this title

About the Author

Tarja Nikula is Professor at the Centre for Applied Language Studies, University of Jyvaskyla, Finland. Her research interests include CLIL, classroom discourse, pragmatics of language learning and use, language education policies, multilingual classroom practices.Emma Dafouz is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Linguistics at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. Her research interests include CLIL, English-medium instruction, language policies, higher education and classroom discourse.Pat Moore is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philology and Translation at the Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Spain. Her research interests include CLIL, bilingualism, translanguaging, bilingual education and classroom praxis.Ute Smit is Associate Professor in the Department of English Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria. Her research interests include CLIL, English-medium instruction, English as a lingua franca, language policy and classroom discourse.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Conceptualising Integration in CLIL and Multilingual Education

By Tarja Nikula, Emma Dafouz, Pat Moore, Ute Smit

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2016 Tarja Nikula, Emma Dafouz, Pat Moore, Ute Smit and authors of individual chapters
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78309-613-8

Contents

Contributors, 
Acknowledgements, 
Foreword: Integrating Content and Language in Education: Best of Both Worlds? Rick de Graaff, 
More Than Content and Language: The Complexity of Integration in CLIL and Bilingual Education Tarja Nikula, Christiane Dalton-Puffer, Ana Llinares and Francisco Lorenzo, 
Part 1: Curriculum and Pedagogy Planning, 
1 Cognitive Discourse Functions: Specifying an Integrative Interdisciplinary Construct Christiane Dalton-Puffer, 
2 Historical Literacy in CLIL: Telling the Past in a Second Language Francisco Lorenzo and Christiane Dalton-Puffer, 
3 Learning Mathematics Bilingually: An Integrated Language and Mathematics Model (ILMM) of Word Problem-Solving Processes in English as a Foreign Language Angela Berger, 
4 A Bakhtinian Perspective on Language and Content Integration: Encountering the Alien Word in Second Language Mathematics Classrooms Richard Barwell, 
Part 2: Participants, 
5 University Teachers' Beliefs of Language and Content Integration in English-Medium Education in Multilingual University Settings Emma Dafouz, Julia Hüttner and Ute Smit, 
6 CLIL Teachers' Beliefs about Integration and about Their Professional Roles: Perspectives from a European Context Kristiina Skinnari and Eveliina Bovellan, 
Part 3: Practices, 
7 Integration of Language and Content Through Languaging in CLIL Classroom Interaction: A Conversation Analysis Perspective Tom Morton and Teppo Jakonen, 
8 Teacher and Student Evaluative Language in CLIL Across Contexts: Integrating SFL and Pragmatic Approaches Ana Llinares and Tarja Nikula, 
9 Translanguaging in CLIL Classrooms Pat Moore and Tarja Nikula, 
Conclusion: Language Competence, Learning and Pedagogy in CLIL – Deepening and Broadening Integration Constant Leung and Tom Morton, 
References, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Cognitive Discourse Functions: Specifying an Integrative Interdisciplinary Construct

Christiane Dalton-Puffer

Introduction

In the introduction, we argued that content and language integrated learning (CLIL) needs to articulate substantial links between the pedagogies of different subjects like mathematics, history or economics and the pedagogy of language teaching in order to fulfil its promise of 'dual focus'. The underlying idea of this chapter is, therefore, that integration actually lies in transdisciplinarity and that cognitive discourse functions (CDFs) constitute a conceptual and pedagogical territory where such transdisciplinarity can be achieved (Dalton-Puffer, 2013).

Since learning as a cognitive event is not directly observable, the nearest we can hope to get are its observable analogues. In the case of CLIL, these analogues are to be sought in the secondary school classrooms and the discursive interaction between teachers and learners in them. Today, there is a broad consensus in education that classroom talk during lessons is the chief locus of knowledge construction and subjects are 'talked into being' (e.g. Edwards & Mercer, 1987; Ehlich & Rehbein, 1986; Mercer, 2000; Wells, 1999). However, it is not only the social construct of school subjects that is at issue, it is the activity of learning itself. Under a social and contextual theory of learning (implying a social and contextual theory of language), we must assume that participant verbalisations, which make the learning matter intersubjectively accessible and represent knowledge objects, thought processes and epistemological stance, are constitutive of learning itself. These verbal actions I call cognitive discourse functions (sometimes also referred to as academic language functions). CDFs thus are verbal routines that have arisen in answer to recurring demands while dealing with curricular content, knowledge items and abstract thought. The actional demands as such (e.g. classifying, hypothesising) and the requirement that students demonstrate the ability to enact them, are regular features in today's competence oriented school-curricula. For learners in CLIL classrooms, however, operating in an imperfectly known second or foreign language, the linguistic resources presupposed by the enactment of these competences are often precarious, a situation that may also hold for CLIL teachers who normally share their students' status as second language (L2) users of the medium of instruction. So subject-specific language issues would need to be addressed in the classroom, but content-subject specialist CLIL teachers view this as outside their expertise and responsibility (except vocabulary). It is my contention that CDFs and their linguistic realisation may be a pivot that can change this view and give CLIL teachers the perspective that when they are modelling/teaching how to verbalise subject-specific cognitive actions, they are not 'doing the language teachers' job' but actually teaching their subject in a very substantial way.

This chapter, then, approaches integration via a transdisciplinary construct of CDFs, grounded on both educational and linguistic concepts, and links subject-specific cognitive learning goals with the linguistic representations they receive in classroom interaction. The rationale of the construct lies in its aim to conceptually order and reduce the multitude of academic language functions that are circulating in curricula and specialist literature alike. Its aim is to enable researchers and teacher educators to access CDFs via a principled heuristic tool which enhances their visibility (and ultimately teachability) in naturally unfolding classroom interaction. Next, the theoretical rationale of the construct will be briefly introduced (for a full account see Dalton-Puffer, 2013). The main part of the chapter is dedicated to a description of the seven components of the CDF construct, illustrated with examples from naturalistic CLIL classroom discourse.

Theoretical Grounding and Description of the CDF Construct

Multiperspectival theoretical grounding in education and linguistics

The formulation of learning goals and competence models is a central concern of educational research and development and Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (Anderson et al., 2001; Bloom, 1956) is certainly one of the seminal texts in this respect. A cascade of publications in different contexts and educational levels (e.g. Bailey et al., 2002; Biggs & Tang, 2011) have presented further attempts at formulating coherent taxonomies and identifying verbal behaviours that can serve as indicators of learners having reached a particular learning goal (normally in the shape of can-do statements of the kind can compare X and Y, can elaborate W etc.). All of these approaches have in common that they take a curricular perspective, that is to say they set standards for, rather than examine the practice of, teaching and learning. An analogous perspective has also been adopted in the Council of Europe's project Language(s) in Other Subjects which aims at systematically cataloguing the linguistic requirements arising in connection with participating in lower secondary history, science, mathematics or literature classrooms across a number of European education systems (e.g. Beacco et al., 2010), its aim being to improve support of at-risk learners. In the German context this has led to the proposal of a frame of reference for German as an L2 at lower secondary level (Thürmann & Vollmer, 2013; Vollmer & Thürmann, 2010) which I consider a milestone in making visible the 'hidden language curriculum' in the content subjects.

In these and numerous other projects and studies, a broad range of verbs designating cognitive-verbal actions are repeatedly mentioned. A comprehensive literature review has produced an inventory of 54 such verbs in English and the extent and complexity of this lexical field clearly demands a structuring construct that makes it operationalisable for different purposes (see Dalton-Puffer, 2013; Lackner, 2012).

The mapping of words onto action and action onto words is a central concern of linguistic pragmatics. Since Austin (1962) and Searle (1969), the understanding that linguistic utterances constitute actions has become universally accepted. A broad range of research has applied Searle's typology of speech acts (representatives, directives, commissives, expressives, declaratives) in the description and comparison of numerous languages, as well as in language acquisition research (Rose & Kasper, 2001) and applied linguistics (e.g. Trimble, 1985). Trimble (1985) bases his description of English for Science and Technology on an analysis of standard communicative intentions in technical expert communication and presents their routine linguistic realisations for the benefit of L2 users of English. A similar approach was taken by 1980s East-German scholars (Hoffmann, 1988; Schmidt, 1981) who also focused on technical communication. Finally, lists of speech act verbs (e.g. Verschueren, 1980: 7) contain numerous items that also feature in the formulation of curricular learning goals and can thus be considered to represent academic language functions.

My understanding of CDFs thus is one that regards them as the product of recurrent situative demands arising in the context of organised learning events, i.e. lessons. Put differently, CDFs are patterns which emerge from the needs humans have when they deal with cognitive content for the purposes of learning, representing and exchanging knowledge. They offer participants involved in knowledge-oriented communication, patterns and schemata of a discursive, lexical and grammatical nature which facilitate dealing with standard situations where knowledge is being constructed and made intersubjectively accessible.

The CDF construct

As briefly sketched above, the CDF construct is based on the pragmatic postulate that it is a speaker's communicative intentions that materialiseas speech acts. In the case of CDFs, these intentions concern the desire to externalise cognitive processes. Within the logic of mainstream pragmatic theory it thus makes sense to assume that there is an underlying communicative intention of the speaker to let others know which cognitive steps they are taking in handling subject content, in sharing knowledge items and structures and in making them intersubjectively accessible. Intersubjective accessibility is the precondition for institutional learning to become possible at all and one must hence assume that such communicative intentions become relevant for all participants in the learning situation at different times. In other words, CDFs concern both learners and teachers.

As one surveys the 54 verbs extracted from curricular documents (Dalton-Puffer, 2013) in terms of their underlying communicative intentions, an interesting semantic structure emerges: almost all of the verbs can be subsumed under seven basic communicative intentions, thus producing seven basic types of CDF. These are assembled in the CDF construct depicted in Table 1.1 where Column 2 contains the seven basic communicative intentions formulated in simple everyday language.

The designations of the function types in the left column are a deliberate choice in order to underscore the fact that the seven elements of the construct are not entities but categories which have internal structure. The 'speaking' names assigned to the seven functions are indeed names and not the formally identical words. It is an attempt at establishing something like a terminology but there are problems, of course, since the semantics of natural language lexemes is fluid: different aspects of their meaning potential get activated in different contexts of use, a phenomenon which proper terminologies seek to avoid. However, since we do not have any direct evidence of the cognitive processes that these words seek to name (at least for the time being), it is impossible to attach a proper term to an unequivocally defined object. This, nevertheless, should not jeopardise the usefulness of the construct as a heuristic tool.

As already mentioned, the seven types are to be understood as categories which subsume a range of CDF verbs. These are represented in Table 1.2; however, a discussion of their extension and mutual relations cannot be accomplished in this chapter and must await another occasion.

Some categories are more populated than others: compare Evaluate with DEFINE. Perhaps this is because the function types themselves are different in scope. Kidd (1996) pointed out the existence of micro- and macro-functions without, however, providing criteria for distinguishing them other than their length (number of words, clauses, turns). Equally diffuse are the links to notions like logical relations, logical patterns or rhetorical patterns (see Ehlich & Rehbein, 1986; Lemke, 1990; Trimble, 1985). In other words, the internal structure of the seven function types remains unexplored for the moment. The only thing which can be said with certainty is that this structure is complex.

However, not only is the internal structure of the seven function types in the CDF construct complex, but also their borders are fuzzy. The seven types are not disjunct and not necessarily exclusive. On the contrary, they frequently include each other. Define always contains CLASSIFY, but not all occurrences of CLASSIFY are part of DEFINE. DESCRIBE can be part of EXPLAIN, REPORT or DEFINE, but there are also instances of DESCRIBE which stand alone.

A first exploratory study, which employs the construct in analysing a set of six CLIL physics lessons (Kröss, 2014), has shown that the seven CDF types operate on two levels, forming episodes which are themselves composed of stages that are again realised by CDFs. These moves are often the same as the episode as a whole but may be interlaced with other functions.

Description of the Seven CDF Components

In this section, the seven function types will be characterised in more detail accompanied by examples from naturalistic CLIL classroom discourse. The internal structure of each function type cannot, however, be addressed in detail. All examples stem from the data pool of the ConCLIL project. Project members from Spain, Austria and Finland have contributed a total of 41 lesson transcripts from their data collections of secondary CLIL classrooms, covering the subjects history, geography, science, accounting, business studies and tourism. The data analysis for the present chapter was exploratory rather than comprehensive; its interest was to identify examples from naturalistic classroom discourse that would illustrate the CDFs that comprise the construct introduced in this chapter.

Classify

Given that the corresponding cognitive activity seems to be at the heart of knowledge construction in general, CLASSIFY is a key CDF. In the words of Anderson and Krathwohl (2001: 49) 'each subject matter has a set of categories that are used to discover new elements as well as to deal with them once they are discovered', thus pointing out the centrality of classification for knowledge creation. Complementary to this dynamic aspect of classifying, there is the static aspect of 'knowing about the categories and classifications of a subject area' which is laid down in the knowledge dimension of the taxonomy of thinking skills (Anderson et al., 2001). This is a more abstract knowledge type than mere knowledge of terms or facts and it is more complex because classifications actually form links or disjunctures between specific terms and facts. Other than in the case of observable knowledge elements that can be described, weighed and measured, classifications and categories are very much a matter of agreement and convenience. In fact, each categorisation moves us away from the specific and observable towards the more abstract: whereas knowledge of specific details stems from observation and discovery, knowledge of classifications and categories has to be learned from experts, which makes knowledge of classifications an important part of developing expertise.

Classifying thus involves detecting relevant features or patterns that 'fit' both the specific instance and the concept or principle, and the activity thus begins with the specific instance or example and requires the student finding a general concept or principle to which it can be linked or subsumed.

Mohan's influential knowledge framework (1986) accords classification a central role, making it one of three elements in his framework: Classification – Principles – Evaluation. The papers written for the Council of Europe project for history, science and mathematics (Beacco, 2010; Linneweber-Lammerskitten, 2010; Vollmer, 2010) all mention classifying but differ in the granularity they accord to it. Beacco (2010; see also Achugar & Carpenter, 2012) regards it as one of the seven central operations for the subject of history, whereas Vollmer (2010; science) and Linneweber-Lammerskitten (2010; mathematics) consider it a micro-function.

Trimble's (1985) work is important as it offers a more in-depth treatment of the range of cognitive operations involved in enacting the process of classification as well as the linguistic steps required for its verbalisation. He observes that novices have difficulties both in the discipline and the language (Trimble, 1985: 20) as they may be uncertain about both the direction of the classifying process (members to class or class to members), and about the nature of the base of the classification (similarity or difference?).

In a biology lesson on genetics, the teacher introduces the term 'environmental variation' linking it to lifestyle by way of the example of muscle growth caused by exercise. After that, the teacher sets a classification activity where the students are asked to group physical features of humans into three categories: inherited, environmental, combined.

Example 1 CLASSIFY (Biology, Grade 9; age 15)

T: [longish introduction of the activity] You're supposed to fill in this table, right? With the features underneath. So [...] look at this, this is what, this is exactly what you have ok? [ ...] What are we supposed to be doing?

S: Filling in the ((x. ... x)) using the corresponding

T: Think a little bit, think a little bit about the features that we've got

T: And this, these are the features, can you see the word? You can see the list below in your table, so all features that we have, [...] So, we've got the hair colour, we've got ... the eye colour, ..... and then there are others being weight, height, [....] Ok, so this is to be filled in with features that are inherited. This is to be filled in with features that are environmental. And the last column?

S: Features inherited and environmental

T: So both, ok? Now, have a go. Have a go. [students work in groups to fill in the table]

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Conceptualising Integration in CLIL and Multilingual Education by Tarja Nikula, Emma Dafouz, Pat Moore, Ute Smit. Copyright © 2016 Tarja Nikula, Emma Dafouz, Pat Moore, Ute Smit and authors of individual chapters. Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1783096136
• ISBN 13: 9781783096138
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 296
• Editor: Tarja Nikula, Emma Dafouz, Pat Moore, Ute Smit