Abstract Summary
This presentation provides an overview of shifting orientations to language in CLIL research, realized as growing attention to the notion of integration and to the need to conceptualize language skills to be attained in CLIL as subject-specific and connected to knowledge creating practices of different subjects and their disciplinary origins
Abstract :
A key characteristic of CLIL throughout its existence has been its double-faceted aim to foster simultaneous content and language development. This presentation provides an overview of shifting research orientations to this duality. In the early phases of CLIL, language-driven research approaches were typical, focusing on the effects of CLIL on foreign/second language learning and use, and on its added value in comparison to foreign language teaching (for overview, see Dalton-Puffer 2011). System-based views of language prevailed, often detached from content learning concerns. Over the years, influenced both by accumulating research-based knowledge of CLIL as well as research developments in language learning and education more generally, there has been growing attention to the very notion of integration and to the need to conceptualize language skills to be attained in CLIL as subject-specific and connected to knowledge creating practices of different subjects and their disciplinary origins (Llinares, Morton & Whittaker 2012; Nikula et al. 2016). In this process, system and product-oriented approaches to language and its learning have been complemented with views embracing the notions of subject-specific ways of meaning making and disciplinary literacies.
Such shifting orientations to language have also created the need for theoretical constructs and methodological tools to capture the inherent connectedness of language and content. The notions of cognitive discourse functions (Dalton-Puffer 2013) and pluriliteracies (Meyer et. al 2015), for example, have arisen out of the need to account for the role of language in knowledge construction across subjects. Ideally, such conceptualizations should also inform pedagogies and help CLIL teachers support knowledge creation and display in their subjects, and to recognize their role in socializing learners into language and literacy practices of their areas of specialization.
