22nd International LASLAB Symposium

Updating the CLIL Acronym: Shifting the “L=Language” to “L=Literacy”

As illustrated in Figure 1, despite the fact that foreign language (FL-) and Content-instruction are characterized by such different textbooks, classroom dynamics and teaching traditions, a shared concern is students’ ability to use language well when speaking or writing about complex content-relevant notions, in age-appropriate ways, as expected by their chosen professional community: i.e., productive academic/discipline-specific literacy . Indeed, be it the world of electricians or electrical engineers, professionals are expected to produce discourse which reflects community-accepted ways of ““languaging” about community knowledge”. However, if “academic content and language” at post-primary level are already complex and challenging in L1, mainstreaming CLIL into post-primary education must ensure the achievement of all school-leavers, including those who lack resources for extracurricular FL tuition and/or those not raised by academically minded caregivers. In this workshop, participants will enter the shoes of 10-, 12-, and 17-year-olds and, using CLIL-materials and M&Ms (no eating required), will personally experience how the use of a FL can, not only facilitate the comprehension of otherwise complex chemistry concepts, but also the seamless assimilation of complex discipline-specific discourses that learners need to correctly “language about” these chemistry-specific concepts, in age-appropriate ways. Classroom results obtained from the use of these literacy-building materials will be presented briefly, alongside step-by-step analyses of how the learning processes seamlessly integrated content comprehension into language use, and thus the mastery of discipline-specific literacy/ies . Through this workshop, participants will come to appreciate that, by expanding the “L=Language” in the CLIL acronym to “L=Literacy/ies”, it becomes easier to “integrate content with language”, and thus “design learning” with all CLIL-learners in mind.

The Language Quadriptych: The story of a tool

In this presentation I will introduce the Language Quadriptych, a practice-driven, pedagogical tool aimed at providing systematic support on language learning for teachers, which then can translate into support for students. The tool is based on a collaborative action research project carried out with secondary school teachers and students at a bilingual (Spanish-English) school in Argentina. If bilingual education is understood as educational policy and a form of education, then the Language Quadriptych has the potential to become a planning tool which can enable teachers to design and implementing learning opportunities which will raise students’ disciplinary literacies and language awareness in formal education. The tool can also support students’ development of critical thinking and metacognitive reflection in an additional language. In this talk, I will underscore the power of action research as a enabling practice towards sustainability and situated pedagogies.

Scaffolding Language Development in CLIL Classrooms

The fundamental premise underlying CLIL instruction is the expectation that students can learn and teachers can teach both meaningful content – including academic subject-matter content – and a new language (L2) at the same time. The crux of effective CLIL teaching is language and content integration – teachers and students have to attend to both content and language if the L2 learning benefits of these school-based programs are to be maximized. Yet content and language integration is a pedagogical challenge for teachers, because there is an inherent dilemma underlying CLIL and other content-based language education programs. Namely, improving students’ proficiency requires students’ extended use of the L2, whereas extended use of the L2 requires higher levels of proficiency. In other words, how can students fully participate in CLIL classrooms in a language that they are still learning and know only partially? The answer lies in the scaffolding that teachers provide to enhance classroom instruction.

This presentation will begin with a definition of scaffolding and a brief introduction to various types of scaffolds available to CLIL teachers. In actual classroom discourse there is a dynamic relationship between strategies for scaffolding for student comprehension (assisting students in understanding content presented through the L2) and those for scaffolding student production (supporting students in productively using the L2 to engage with the content). The majority of the presentation will home in on strategies for effectively scaffolding for student production in the context of meaningful content instruction.

Teacher-Researcher collaboration in CLIL: a needed dialogue between research and practice

Recent studies have called for the need for dialogue between researchers and practitioners and the important role of the active involvement by practitioners in research studies in second language acquisition (e.g. Sato and Loewen, 2019). Drawing on recent work carried out by the UAM-CLIL research group (http://www.uam-clil.org), I will showcase the importance of developing this dialogue in CLIL contexts, involving content teachers, language teachers and researchers (Llinares, Morton & Whittaker, 2024). I will illustrate the application of research models such as Systemic Functional Linguistics, Legitimation Code Theory and Cognitive Discourse Functions to help CLIL teachers develop a joint understanding of disciplinary literacies. In a series of seminars, the teachers moved from awareness and some sort of shared understanding of the role of language in CLIL disciplinary literacies, to a multidisciplinary assessment of students’ production each teacher drawing on their own discipline (language and content), to interdisciplinary reflection (trying to integrate understandings of content and language in seminar discussions) and, finally, to collaborative design of transdisciplinary tasks, which were implemented in their classes, followed by the students’ assessment of their own production using both language and content criteria.

CLIL in Practice: What we know works in the classroom

In this session, I shall discuss what teachers say has contributed to the successful transformation of legacy pedagogies in CLIL classrooms through challenging the notion of quality learning for all young people. Across a range of multilingual settings, recent work explores ways of experimenting three types of fluencies in multilingual classrooms foregrounding (pluri)literacies approaches led by both language and subject teachers alike. When such approaches are underpinned by sustained practices that promote deeper learning then normalising dialogic practices, designing tasks that mentor learning and make the invisible visible, pathways emerge for learners anywhere to experience self-value, resilience and a sense of purpose.