Abstract Summary
This presentation examines Cognitive Discourse Functions (CDFs) in CLIL students’ written production of academic content in L2 in social science subjects. The data by primary school students in Finland and Spain will be analysed with attention to the frequency of CDFs and to the fluency and complexity of their realizations.
Abstract :
The ability to manage specific forms of disciplinary expression is regarded as a factor of academic success (Council of Europe recommendations—CM/Rec, 2014)and the means by which students have access to powerful knowledge (cf. Young, 2011). This is particularly challenging in CLIL settings, where content is learnt in/through an additional language. In this scenario, Dalton-Puffer’s (2013; 2016) construct of cognitive discourse functions (CDFs) is a useful tool to investigate students’ production of academic content in an L2. Although previous studies have investigated CLIL students’ development of different CDFs (e.g. Whittaker & McCabe, forthcoming, on Evaluate; Nashaat & Llinares, forthcoming, on Define; Evnitskaya & Dalton-Puffer, forthcoming, on Classify in the Spanish context; Dalton-Puffer et al. 2018 in the Austrian context), there is need for comparative studies across CLIL contexts in order to identify common/different strengths and weaknesses, which may be related to different linguistic and educational cultures.
In this scenario, we present findings from an empirical study in which we investigated CLIL students’ realizations of CDFs (Define, Describe, Explain, Classify, Report, Evaluate and Explore) in English. The subjects were primary school students (grade 6) participating in CLIL programs in Finland and Spain. In order to guarantee comparability, the two sets of the data were obtained by asking the students to write in response to a similar prompt in the area of social science (history in the Spanish context and geography in the Finnish context). We compared the frequency of the CDFs produced, the CDFs embedded in the CDFs prompted and the fluency and complexity of students’ realizations of CDFs. The results reveal similarities across contexts in the frequency and extension of some of the CDFs produced, and differences in terms of CDF complexity, measured in students’ use of clause complexes, appraisal resources and nominal groups to express different CDFs.
