This paper presents a quantitative and qualitative analysis of technicality in CLIL and non-CLIL biology lessons. It aims to demonstrate that even in languages as closely related as English and German, technicality can be an issue, and has implications for how we teach biology in English and German.
The linguistic requirements for teachers and students not only vary considerably depending on the context, but also on the subject that is taught in the respective CLIL programme. That is, the linguistic requirements are very different in history classes as compared to science classes. According to Wignell et al. (1993), technicality and abstraction are the two main components of the scientific discourse of any given academic subject. While abstraction is more relevant in the humanities, it is technicality that marks the discourse of natural or physical sciences. The encoding of technicality in technical terms is thus one of the aspects that make scientific concepts difficult for learners to grasp, not only but particularly when it is taught in a second or foreign language. Nevertheless, research on the role of technicality and how it exactly affects communication in the CLIL science classroom has not yet made much progress, especially in comparison to non-CLIL classes. The current paper therefore presents a two-fold analysis of technicality in CLIL and non-CLIL biology lessons, drawing on data collected at an upper-secondary school in Switzerland consisting of 31 video-recordings of biology lessons taught by two teachers who teach their subject both in English (CLIL) and in German (non-CLIL). Based on Wignell et al.'s (1993) framework of technicality, I first propose a model to identify and analyze technical terms quantitatively to get a quantitative overview of technical terms in CLIL and non-CLIL biology classrooms and the respective teaching materials. Based on this, the second, more qualitative analysis deals with the introduction of new technical terms. In the science classroom, with its high frequency of technical terms, it is crucial that new technical terms are properly introduced. Therefore, the qualitative analysis of technicality illustrates how new technical terms are introduced in the classroom and the respective teaching materials in a CLIL and non-CLIL context.
The two-fold analyis of technicality thus offers a quantitative overview of how technical terms are distributed in CLIL and non-CLIL biology lessons as well as a qualitative analysis of how new technical terms are introduced in said corpus.
Results show that there is a big discrepancy between the lexical density of the teaching materials and the discussions in the classroom, and further showcase how important it is to properly unpack new technical terms in the classroom, particularly in CLIL.
