Developing CLIL programmes requires educators to consider a multitude of aspects in order to design a curriculum that furthers both content knowledge and language skills. The talk introduces a CLIL science subject at an Austrian upper-secondary school that uses Dalton-Puffer’s (2013) cognitive discourse functions as a vital planning principle.
Graduates from upper secondary schools all over Europe are increasingly expected to be proficient users of English – not only of general English, but also of English that is field- and content-specific. To meet these demands many secondary schools have introduced CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) programmes. Such programmes frequently lack an explicit language curriculum and if they do have one, it often is rather traditionally designed. The challenge of designing truly integrated language-and-content curricula has frequently been noted (e.g. Nikula et al. 2016). A recent promising suggestion has been made by Dalton-Puffer (2013) in the form of a construct of Cognitive Discourse Functions (CDFs) that establishes a zone of convergence between content and language pedagogies and thereby allows genuine content-and-language integration. This presentation will introduce a CLIL curriculum designed on the basis of said construct. In the first part of the presentation, the CDF construct, which explains in a coherent and theoretically explicit way how cognitive processes concerning subject-specific facts, concepts and categories are verbalised in recurring and patterned ways during classroom learning, will be introduced with its seven function types Classify, Define, Describe, Evaluate, Explain, Explore, Report. In the second part, I will report on a teaching and research project where a content and a language teacher collaborate on creating a new bilingual school subject. I will explain how Cognitive Discourse Functions are being employed in the formulation of goals, pedagogical design as well as the actual teaching of science to upper-secondary students. Examples from the first teaching cycle will be presented, which show that Cognitive Discourse Functions cannot only be utilized as a valuable instrument in curricular planning, but also enable students to use English to act on and communicate science content.
