Abstract Summary
Drawing on a ten-month longitudinal study of two Austrian English-medium CLIL secondary school classrooms, this presentation examines the teaching-and-learning of mathematics through English. I discuss how teachers and students simultaneously use and develop linguistic repertories, including L1 and L2 mathematics registers, and the implications for language sensitive pedagogy.
Abstract :
The international growth of English as the language of teaching-and-learning has been rapid (Macaro, Curle, Pun, An, & Dearden, 2018), and, in the Austrian context, there have been both federal and regional developments in secondary education as a result of this. Since 2013, CLIL provision has been compulsory in technical colleges (BMBWF, 2019), and, at a local level, regional education authorities are supporting schools in developing bilingual streams and international programmes such as the International Baccalaureate. As these changes are implemented, subject teachers and students are increasingly finding themselves required to extend their individual linguistic repertoires whilst learning the specific discourses and/or registers of the curriculum subjects.
Although there is a plethora of research on CLIL implementation, the role of language in CLIL, and CLIL in Austria (see, for example, Dalton-Puffer & Bauer-Marschallinger, 2019; Gierlinger, 2015; Hüttner & Smit, 2018; Llinares, Morton, & Whittaker, 2012), little research focuses on how subject-specific content knowledge is developed at the same time as language is being learnt, with a particular dearth investigating mathematics (Berger, 2017). To address this gap in the literature, my research draws on theories of social semiotics (Halliday, 1978; Kress, 2010) to explore the functional role of language and other semiotic systems in the teaching-and-learning of mathematics in two Austrian English-medium CLIL secondary school classrooms.
In this paper, I present findings from a ten-month classroom based study, discuss the use and learning of L1 and L2 mathematical subject-specific discourse, and consider the implications for language sensitive classroom praxis in multilingual contexts by drawing on samples of student work, notes from classrooms observations, audio recordings of classroom interaction, still photos, instructional materials, and interviews exploring the teachers’ and students’ perspectives on L2 disciplinary use and learning.
