Conceptualising Integration in CLIL and Multilingual Education

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

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783096152
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Linguistique

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.

Part 1

Curriculum and Pedagogy Planning

1Cognitive 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 Subjects¹ 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 materialise as 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 lexem...