Language and content ‘integration’: the affordances of additional languages as a tool within a single curriculum space

Abstract

‘Language across the curriculum’ has been pivotal in establishing a knowledge base on the role of language for accessing opportunities afforded by the curriculum. Yet, the ubiquity of language within all facets of human activity – not least of all the more abstract domains of thinking and relating with others – can easily obscure its perceptibility as an object for research relative to other priorities; especially when the curriculum focus is directed towards content-oriented areas, such as mathematics or the humanities. This paper uses an ecological framework to consider the place of language when the teacher’s focus is not solely on language, or content, but is equally attentive to both through a relatively new approach to theorizing learners’ non-native language within the curriculum: content and language integrated learning. In particular, it critically examines the notion of ‘integration’ as a pedagogical assumption for working with language in curriculum domains by focusing on teachers’ perceptions of the affordances of language as a meditational tool within the classroom space. Findings raise new implications for understanding the role of language(s) within the curriculum, and are significant for addressing the needs of a changing, globalized student demographic where the presence of multiple languages will increasingly shape learners’ engagement with the curriculum.

Keywords:

• Language across the curriculum
• content and language integrated learning (CLIL)
• classroom-based research
• ecology
• affordances
• teacher knowledge/beliefs

Introduction

Since the emergence of social constructivist pedagogies in the mid-1960s (e.g. Vygotsky, 1962, 1987), the significance of language for thinking and cognition has been central to understandings of learning, teaching and curriculum, as well as the relationship between them. This link between language and curriculum has remained strong in various policy permeations through to the present, as most recently evidenced in the US Common Core Standards for English with ‘requirements not only for English language arts (ELA) but also for literacy in history/social studies, science, and technical subjects [….] students must learn to read, write, speak, listen, and use language effectively in a variety of content areas’ (NGA Centre & CCSSO, 2014, para. 2).

Yet, language seems so natural to human relationships, including the language shared between students and teachers within the classroom, that the question of ‘why’ language is used in the way that is often seems less significant than a more immediate focus on ‘what’ is being said. Even within language-dedicated classrooms, where one might expect a greater awareness of language use and purpose, the focus is still primarily comprehension (i.e. decoding and understanding ‘what’) with, perhaps, some further consideration to the ways the message is conveyed (i.e. elements for encoding the ‘what’). When the focus shifts from the language classroom to the wider curriculum context with competing disciplinary emphases – such as science or the humanities – attention to language, and especially how and why it is used, can seem even less consequential.

This article adopts an ecological framework – with specific attention to the affordances of tools within sociocultural spaces – to examine the role of language in relation to curriculum; in particular, problematizing the construct of ‘integration’ with respect to where language sits relative to content. The field for empirical analysis is a ‘content and language integrated learning’ (or CLIL) classroom. A relatively new model for developing language through other curriculum domains (Coyle, Hood, & Marsh, 2010), CLIL has gained significant traction across Europe since being identified in the 2004 European Commission’s Action Plan, Promoting Language Learning and Linguistic Diversity, as having ‘a major contribution to make to the Union’s language learning goals’ (p. 8). In the last three to five years, CLIL has also begun to expand rapidly across the Middle East (Riddlebarger, 2013), South East Asia (Hanington, Pillai, & Kwah, 2013) and Japan (Sasajima, Ikeda, Hemmi, & Reilly, 2011). The current study draws on data from a CLIL classroom in Australia – involving a Year 10 Geography unit taught in Japanese – where the approach has been identified as having potential to help reform Languages teaching and learning within the Victorian curriculum (Cross, 2013, 2015).

Defined as ‘any dual-focused educational context in which an additional language, thus not usually the first language of the learners involved, is used as a medium in the teaching and learning of non-language content’ (Marsh, 2002, p. 15), CLIL has been the subject of considerable research to understand how learners come to acquire new language skills simultaneously through discipline-based learning in other areas of the curriculum. In common with other models of ‘strong’ bilingual education, such as the Canadian immersion approach (which delivers the mainstream curriculum to English-speaking students through French), CLIL has been shown to make positive contributions to the development of students’ literacy (in both languages), academic achievement (to the extent they typically achieve as well, or better, than peers following the same curriculum in their first language) and in levels of intercultural awareness and sensitivity (Baker, 2011; Coyle, 2009; Coyle et al., 2010; Dalton-Puffer, 2008; Lasagabaster & Sierra, 2009; Mehisto, Marsh, & Frigols, 2008). Part of this success lies in conscious and explicit awareness to developing both language and content within every teaching and learning episode, and the continual acquisition of not only communicative language skills, but also new knowledge, skills and concepts making up that discipline area to sustain ongoing learning and development over the course of study.

This makes CLIL an especially fertile empirical space for researching how and why language is used within the curriculum, as teachers can assume no prior knowledge in either language or content. Despite the language across the curriculum movement originating with the teaching of English as a mother tongue, and this is where it continues to have significant impact, it is perhaps unsurprising that some of the most productive research in this area has emerged from studies of how English second language (ESL) learners navigate through the mainstream curriculum (e.g. Gibbons, 2003). Indeed, CLIL’s own antecedents similarly lie in the ESL movement and, especially, Mohan’s work identifying what was distinctive when the pedagogic focus is neither language, or content, but both – simultaneously (Mohan, 1979, 1986, 2002, 2013; Mohan, Leung, & Davison, 2001). Integrated curriculum contexts, Mohan (1990, p. 144) argues, means having to move the focus ‘beyond second language learning to learning language for academic purposes and beyond language learning to content learning’:

‘Language’ includes not only the rules of sentence grammar but also the organization of discourse; ‘content’ includes not only content in the sense of the message of a sentence but also content as it is seen by the content teacher, content as the organization of information within the perspective of a discipline.

More recent work has shifted this focus to implications for dual-focused assessment within such contexts, particularly as they relate to ESL learners in mainstream environments (Leung, 2001; Mohan, Leung, & Slater, 2010). While this has been essential for establishing a knowledge base for the field, CLIL offers a new context to understand the nature of these demands further still. ESL, by definition, is situated within settings where English is the language for broader communication and discourse beyond the classroom (Bell, 2011). Students therefore often have at least some regular access to opportunities for developing language in addition to their engagement with the curriculum. CLIL, on the other hand, relies on minority or ‘foreign’ languages as the medium of instruction which is otherwise entirely absent from the students’ lifeworlds beyond that offered in the classroom (Coyle, 2008). Such conditions contribute to a heightened awareness of the role and place of language within the CLIL context, given this is the only opportunity for teachers to work with students’ communicative skills to support curriculum engagement.

However, the majority of this research to date has focused primarily on the learner, and particularly micro-linguistic analyses of learners’ language-in-use (e.g. Dalton-Puffer, Nikula, & Smit, 2010; Llinares, Morton, & Whittaker, 2012; Ruiz de Zarobe & Jiménez Catalán, 2009 largely from systemic-functional linguistic perspectives and, more recently, Jakonen & Morton, 2015 applying conversation analysis to examine peer interaction). Broader considerations that establish the pedagogical conditions to produce such utterances have largely been taken as ‘given’, with the focus less on teachers and teaching, than on understanding learners’ acquisition of language/content in dual-focused settings. Macro-pedagogic deliberations providing the backdrop for such interactions have often been left assumed within extant literature, despite Street’s caveat of needing to ‘understand literacy practices in context: we should be wary of taking them at face value’ (2003, p. 82).

While microlinguistic analyses of learner language have been generative for advancing the field, a key dimension that remains under-researched are teachers’ own perspectives and professional knowledge – their standpoint epistemologies – on what is happening within the content/language space to bring about such conditions in the first instance. Within current framings of CLIL, this coexistence between language/content – i.e. the ‘and’ that signifies ‘integration’ between the two in how the curriculum is ultimately realized and delivered – is still not well understood and in the early stages of theorization (Llinares, 2015). Rather, the knowledge base relies on the assumption that integration is a ‘natural consequence’ of synergies between language and content, drawing on conceptions of disciplinary literacies (Fang & Schleppegrell, 2010). Yet, as Street (1984, 1995) reminds us, literacy is never autonomous in how it comes to be realized as a social practice. How teachers come to make sense of the demands created by the intersections of language, content and the context specific to each setting needs to be taken into account (Coyle, 2008). At the same time, Street (2001, p. 14) also cautions against a ‘naive romanticism’ of the local, to the extent that what we see observed loses relevance beyond the immediate and particular. The imperative need is a framework for analysis that is holistic, and accounts for relationality by examining the participants’ own sense and readings of the settings within they, as subjects of that activity, come to form perceptions, understandings and decisions that ultimately inform their practice (Cross, 2010). It responds to Mohan’s (1990, p. 147) call for research in the field that extends not only the quantitative and analytic lines of inquiry, but also the qualitative and holistic.

To do so, this article adopts an ecological perspective, drawing on Van Lier (2004a), with particular attention to the concept of affordances from a sociocultural theoretical perspective (Gibson, 1977). This is outlined in the section that follows, before an overview of the method, discussion of data, and finally a consideration of the pedagogical implications that the findings carry for rethinking the integration of language with content in the one curriculum space.

Ecological perspectives on contexts for language teaching and learning

As one of the earliest writers on ecological theory as it relates to education, and language and mediation in particular, Van Lier (2000, p. 245) argues ‘that behind the diversity of learning theories and teaching procedures there lies […] a rarely questioned backdrop’. It was problematizing that backdrop – the contexts and practices that Street (2003, p. 82) cautions us against taking at ‘face value’ – which drove much of van Lier’s own work on the potential of ecological metaphors to offer ‘an alternative way of looking at the contexts in which language use and language learning are situated’ (Van Lier, 1997, p. 783):

An ecological approach to language learning questions some basic assumptions that lie behind most of the rationalist and empiricist theories and practices that dominate in our field, and offers fresh ways of looking at some old questions that have been around for a long time. (2000, p. 245)

Creese and Blackledge (2010, p. 104) similarly suggest that the value of an ecological perspective lies in its capacity to ‘[voice] the contradictions, the unpredictabilities, and paradoxes that underlie even the most respectable research in language development’ (citing Kramsh, 2002, p. 8). The ecological metaphor, as they put it, is especially useful for exploring ‘how social ideologies, particularly in relation to multilingualism, are created and implemented’ (p. 104). If we similarly understand pedagogy in social ideological terms – with teaching as a sociocultural act, differently informed and mediated by ideology through policy and practice (Cross, 2009; Lo Bianco, 2010) – then recasting the classroom as an ecological space offers a powerful way to (re)interrogate the place, function and role of language within broader and more expansive accounts of teaching and learning. ‘Ecological linguistics’, as proposed by van Lier, shifts the gaze to ‘a study of language as relations (of thought, action, power), rather than as objects (words, sentences, rules)’ (2000, p. 251). It is thus well suited to complement the extant literature on CLIL which has been predominantly driven by linguistic analyses. In contrast to analysing each constituent element comprising the object of research, an ecological perspective instead shifts the focus to a relational stance on how those who engage with those elements come to perceive and make sense of them within their own terrain. Contrasting an ecological perspective with ‘microgenetic’ linguistic analysis (2004a, p. 212), van Lier suggests that each is dependent upon the other, offering different but complementary scales from which to understand the social space that subjects come to make sense of their worlds, and the practices and activities that outsiders observe within it. The focus, then, is on then ‘relations of possibility between language users [… which] can be acted upon to make further linguistic action possible’. It is ‘at this point’, Van Lier (2004a, p. 95) asserts, ‘affordance [then] links up with the Vygotskyan concept of microgenesis’ (i.e. the utterances we see unfolding between learners).

Subjects of research are thus positioned as ‘perceivers’ – ‘actor[s] within a landscape’ (2004b, p. 87) – where they become the ‘active explorer of information, and the information that is picked up is partly driven by the purposes of the perceiver’ (p. 87). A recognition of the teachers’ emic perspective is therefore crucial to understanding the social and cultural space which they occupy as actors; in this case, as pedagogues. Ecologies are thus neither static nor neutral, but instead emerge from the social and material conditions that those actors perceive as providing affordances for what might be possible within those contexts for activity.

CLIL thus offers a somewhat extraordinary context for examining classroom ecologies with respect to language, since the primary means of mediation to deliver the curriculum cannot be presupposed: students have limited proficiency in the language of instruction. Accordingly, the teacher’s focus is not simply on ensuring messages are ‘transmitted and understood’ (i.e. the cultural artifact of ‘content’), or that communicative proficiency is being developed (i.e. the cultural artifact of ‘language’), but they are simultaneously (and consciously) attending to both. Within CLIL settings, ‘deliberate action’ (Kozulin, 2003, p. 26) becomes manifest in teachers’ pedagogic awareness of how to build new understanding without recourse to already existing symbolic tools.

Here, the ecological construct of ‘affordances’ becomes useful as a unit of analysis to capture teachers’ emic sense-making in relation to the contexts that they occupy as pedagogues, working with language/content in the same curriculum space. As Gibson (1979) sets out in his work on perception within ecological psychology, affordances exist in neither the subject or object, but are born out of the relationship between both: ‘What becomes an affordance depends on what the organism does, what it wants, and what is useful for it’ (Van Lier, 2000; p. 252). Affordances thus provide an analytic tool to capture how subjects read, respond to and make sense of their social spaces as an ongoing, relational system of activity. Again, as Van Lier (2004a, p. 92) elaborates elsewhere, ‘what I perceive is perceived as it is relevant to me […] perception, action and interpretation are part of one dynamic process’. This is represented diagrammatically below (Figure 1):

Figure 1. Affordances. (With kind permission from Springer Science+Business Media: Van Lier, 2004a, p. 92, Figure 4.2)

This process offers a methodological basis to interrogate pedagogic practice from an ecological perspective, focusing on the affordances teachers perceive with respect to language when it exists alongside the teaching of content in the same ‘integrated’ curriculum space. The next section outlines the method used to elicit teachers’ interpretations of activity within the CLIL setting, with specific attention to their perception of language.

Research setting, design and research questions

Setting

In contrast to the more clearly defined features of ‘immersion methodology’ that have evolved since its inception in the mid-1960s (e.g. Baker, 2011), CLIL is distinctive in that ‘there is neither one CLIL approach nor one theory of CLIL’ (Coyle, 2008; p. 101). Indeed, CLIL emerged as an attempt to transcend the well-defined rigidity of immersion as a methodological approach to provide greater flexibility for how a dual-focused pedagogy might be better appropriated across diverse educational (and social, linguistic and political) settings comprising the EU. Some accounts (Grin, 2005 in Hansen & Vaukins, 2011) document more than 216 types of CLIL programmes encompassing a range of settings, content areas and languages. At the same time, this fluidity is further reason for a more careful reading of the practices that do unfold within these spaces to develop a more fulsome account of the pedagogy, grounded in data.

The CLIL setting of interest in this study comprised a five-week curriculum unit for Year 10 that integrated curriculum outcomes in Japanese and Geography. The classes involved two groups of approximately 16 students at an independent boys’ school in Melbourne, Australia, who had elected to take Japanese. The student group was relatively homogenous in terms of cultural and linguistic background, being predominately English first language speakers with a strong Anglo-Australian profile. The school is placed very high on measures of socio-economic advantage. The main teacher, Jason,¹ was an English native speaker with qualifications and experience in both Japanese and Geography. Jason’s language teacher assistant, Naomi, was a Japanese native speaker and recent teacher graduate with a specialization in language education, but without any previous studies or experience in teaching Geography. Neither teacher had taught a CLIL programme of this type before, although Jason had some previous experience of teaching curriculum content through Japanese at another high school with an immersion-style programme in the middle years.

With an emphasis on Geography content, knowledge and skills from the Humanities domain of the Victorian state curriculum (VCAA, 2006), the five-week unit of work took an Asian Studies focus in Geography, examining cultural, economic and adventure tourism in Japan. Jason undertook primary responsibility for planning the unit in consultation with the school’s Humanities coordinators to ensure content was relevant to other areas of the Geography curriculum, while avoiding overlap or redundancy. Naomi assisted with developing materials and language support, while the university-based research team met monthly with Jason for guidance on CLIL pedagogy and principles during the planning stage of the unit.

The programme was taught over five weeks, with three lessons of approximately 55 min each per week (i.e. 165 min per week).

Design and research questions

To generate data on the affordances of language perceived by the teachers as actors within this curriculum space, one of the two CLIL class groups was selected for weekly video recordings. Using a small camera placed as unobtrusively as possible at the back of the room, a total of five lessons were videotaped over the duration of the unit. These recordings were then used as stimulus for a recall procedure (Gass, 2001) with the teacher after each lesson – usually immediately, but always within 24 h at most. The teacher assistant was also interviewed after lessons four and five. Following standard stimulated recall protocols (Gass, 2001; Gass & Mackey, 2000), teachers were asked to watch a playback of the lesson giving their own commentary on what they saw occurring, with the option to pause and elaborate further on any event they felt was especially significant or needed additional detail.

The aim was to generate an account of activity in terms of the teacher’s own interpretation of what had just unfolded. As represented in figure 1, affordances lie in the relationship between action, perception and interpretation that unfold within social spaces, and these recordings were transcribed verbatim to become the primary data-set for analysis. Transcripts were triangulated with the video recording and field notes from the researchers’ running record of events for clarification or contextual detail where necessary.

Data were coded inductively through a close reading and re-reading of the transcripts for teachers’ references to the role, place and function of language within the lesson. As described earlier, our interest was specifically on how the teachers were conscious of language in a setting that required them to develop content knowledge while relying on the students’ non-native tongue. In characterizing an ecological methodology, van Lier asserts the ‘focus [is] on contextual analysis’: ‘close attention to the actions of persons in the context, and the search for “patterns that connect”’ (Van Lier, 1997, p. 784, citing Bateson, 1979). To bring these codes together into themes for interpretation and discussion, the analysis was guided by the following core questions:

•	How do teachers perceive the affordances of language within an integrated curriculum space when their attention is focused on both the development of language and content knowledge?
•	What implications does this view of the role and place of language within the classroom ecology carry for understanding ‘integration’ in that space?

Findings

In distilling how teachers saw language mediating the relationship between developing content-based conceptual knowledge and skills, together with a growing understanding of language, the following themes emerged within this setting. Some confirm existing principles around the primacy of content relative to language for planning pedagogical sequences and tasks (Met, 1998), while others raise further new questions on how and when to separate language from content within such classrooms, as well as the use of the first language as a further tool within language/content integrated contexts.

As emphasized earlier, the focus here are the teachers’ own reading of activity to understand language affordances in the content integrated space as they perceive it, as the subject of that action. Stimulated recall excerpts therefore comprise the primary data for analysis but, in presenting these findings below, supplementary data (key language artefacts or events characteristic of stimuli that were the basis for teachers’ reflections related to each theme) are also included to give some concrete sense of the space itself within which these teachers as the subject-actors provided these reflections.

‘Language(s)’ and ‘content’

Despite our primary interest in language, a key theme to emerge from the data was the primacy of content in ‘driving’ teachers’ language planning decisions, together with where both Japanese and content sat relative to the other language within this space: English. An instance of where the three intersect was most evident in the following vignette:

At the end of the lesson students moved to the front of the classroom to focus on the following PowerPoint slide which had the lesson outcomes summarised in English, and the teacher giving the following mini-plenary:

Table

Jason: outcome ni tsuite kangaemashō ka? workstation 2 o shimashita group wa? chotto yomimashō ka? eigo de yomimashō ka? adam kun, kono outcome o yonde kudasai.	Jason: Let’s consider today’s outcome. Which group that did Workstation 2? Let’s have a look at what’s up here … shall we read it in English? Adam, you read out these outcomes.
Adam: (Reads the PowerPoint slide verbatim, in English)	Adam: (Reads the PowerPoint slide verbatim, in English)
Jason: hai. kore wa yahari muzukashitta to omoimasu ne … mark kun, tabun kore shite imashita yo ne [making hand gestures to measure from point to point]. totemo ōkii chizu o tsukatte, fune, kihouki, sorekara … nani?	Jason: Good. This was a little difficult wasn’t it … Mark, you were probably doing this, right [making hand gestures to measure from point to point]? Using a big map, there was a boat, plane, then … what else?
Mark: shinkansen	Mark: Bullet train
Jason:shinkansen …	Jason: Bullet train …
Ben: densha	Ben: Train
Jason:densha …	Jason: Train …
Lucien:basu	Lucien: Bus
Jason:basu nado, anō … o mite, ichiban hayai, ichiban yasui hōhō o kangaemashita ne.	Jason: Bus and so on. Um … looking at that, you thought about what was the fastest and cheapest method.

Stimulus example 1: Lesson closing.

Although this was, ostensibly at least, still a ‘Japanese language’ programme, Jason points out that for planning it was helpful to focus on ‘geography outcomes first, and then we look at the language that is needed’ (Interview 291–292). As outlined later, this is not to say that content remained the main priority once the programme began, but it was clearly stressed throughout Jason’s account of the lessons that this was the most significant factor in planning and framing the language that then unfolded within the curriculum unit: the process began by first ‘really being aware of what the Geography outcomes are to be, and working through those within the semester’ (pp. 521–523). Content concerns were therefore foregrounded early, with language-related decisions becoming a subsequent consideration based on how that content might be most effectively taught, even if this meant having to then focus on language beyond that set for students at that curriculum level. Jason elaborates:

I think we were a little early in introducing some linguistic content this year because of the project … we wanted them to have a bit of an idea of plain form because it enables them to handle verbs a lot better. So, yeah, they might be a little bit ahead of what they would normally be at this stage. (pp. 176–182)

However despite the initial emphasis on content in the early stages of CLIL planning, teaching ‘language for meaning’ did not take main precedence when material was delivered in class. That is, rather than placing his primary pedagogic focus on content – i.e., having students ‘understand’ the conceptual knowledge or skills related to tourism as the main aim (with language a skill that would then develop out of a primary focus on content) – Jason instead emphasized that it was important to begin lessons by covering the fundamental linguistic elements of language, and in ways that were very explicit. This, he argued, was important for then moving students towards the content-based concepts and skills to be covered later in that lesson. As evident in the event below, his choice of linguistic elements were still interrelated with content (e.g. country names, etc.), but as Jason later contends this clear separation between the two was necessary to transition students into the next stage of the lesson (i.e. where communicative language would then afford greater integration into the teaching and learning around content-based tasks):

Students are meandering into class, taking their seats in chairs set up in a horseshoe formation in an open space at the front of the classroom. While settling down and chatting amongst themselves in English, Jason is going through the roll asking, in Japanese, where a few of the boys are who are not yet in attendance. He announces loudly, ja kyō hajamarimashō ka?’ (OK, shall we get started?), and the formal part of the lesson begins:

Table

Jason: hai, ja minasan aisatsu shimashō ka? minasan konnichi wa	Jason: OK, let’s do the welcome. Hello everyone.
Class: sensei konnichi wa	Class: Hello teacher.
Jason: hajimarimashō	Jason: Let’s get started.
Naomi: hai sō desu ne. ja, zenkai no fukushū kara shimashō. hai ja issho ni yondekara imi o fukushū shimashō. ‘tanoshimu’	Naomi: Yep, OK then. Let’s review what we did last time. Read these cards after me, then tell me the meaning. ‘Tanoshimu’
Class: ‘tanoshimu’	Class: ‘Tanoshimu’.
Naomi: ‘tanoshimu’	Naomi: ‘Tanoshimu’.
Class: ‘tanoshimu’	Class: ‘Tanoshimu’.
Naomi: ‘tanoshimu’ imi wa nan desu ka?	Naomi: ‘Tanoshimu’. What does it mean?
Student raises hand.	Student raises hand.
Naomi: George kun?	Naomi: George?
George:‘Fun’?	George:Fun?
Naomi: ‘Fun’ desu kedo …	Naomi: Fun, but …
Paul (interjecting): Enjoy!	Paul (interjecting): Enjoy!
Naomi. hai sō desu. ‘Enjoy’ no hō ga ii desu ne. tanoshimu, ‘to enjoy’ desu. hai ja sono tsugi. otozureru …	Naomi: That’s right, ‘enjoy’ is better. ‘Tanoshimu’ means ‘to enjoy’. OK, the next one – ‘Otozureru’ …

And this continues for about three minutes, covering ‘to visit’, ‘to experience’, ‘temple’, ‘Buddha’, ‘Snow Festival’, ‘morning markets’, ‘hot springs’, ‘next time’, ‘Golden Week’ (a Japanese holiday), followed by another activity where they then have a minute to write out English version of sentences using words that appear on the projector.

Stimulus example 2: Lesson opening.

Watching the part of the lesson, Jason reflects:

Probably all of the work on the vocabulary … the little activity at the start of the class where we’re matching up [word] cards – those kinds of things are not really ones I’d choose to do in Geography. (pp. 453–459)

While perhaps obvious that teaching vocabulary is not how Jason would have probably approached lesson had it been taught through English, what is less easy to follow is his justification for separating the teaching of vocabulary from Geography-based tasks in what is assumed to be an ‘integrated’ learning space. In other words, rather than embedding language teaching within Geography learning, we instead see a conventional separation of ‘language’ and ‘content’ as would typically exist in the curriculum – indeed, even using ‘traditional’ language teaching techniques that largely divorce language from its context – that unfold micro-sequentially from one turn to the next, at the level of the lesson (cf. blocked out as separate timetable slots across a day or week). Again, responding to another video excerpt at the start of a different lesson:

We just went over the pronunciation of those countries, and then some vocab in terms of the actual topic of the unit which we’d also introduced the previous period … and we went straight on to some of the words which are related to tourism, and types of tourism, because we kind of see that as being a part of the topic which is important that they understand so that we can have something to connect to from week to week. (pp. 28–34)

Indeed, a recurring theme during the stimulated recall commentaries was the idea of positioning students with language ‘to be ready’ to then learn content. Not unlike Walqui’s (2006) discussion of scaffolding across timescales, Jason and Naomi spoke of this ‘bridge’ in terms of within the lesson, throughout the unit, and across the curriculum:

Within the lesson

I wouldn’t have expected them to run with that as an activity without some pre-preparation. So, so we actually went through the first one, sort of talked about all of the meaning of the different characteristics they were looking at, and asked them to checklist and add in extra details, and then discuss those answers together. (Jason, pp. 248–251)

I think, well learning language, drilling is, of course it’s important; but in the CLIL, we do some drill at the beginning of the class, you know, there’s word cards and … but it’s more like kind of brainstorming and revision, but it’s not the main part of the lesson. (Naomi, pp. 160–162)

Throughout the unit

[Researcher]:

You began by working with the vocab cards?

J:

That’s right, vocab cards. I kind of just reviewed some vocabulary from the previous lesson and then, sort of continuing on that vein, using the same vocabulary, I put up some sentences which I wanted the students to spend one minute in groups trying to work out … So that was really a language point at the start: just reviewing some vocab and some sentence structure. (pp. 22–32)

Across the curriculum

R:

So a lot of the language they’d need for the CLIL units … all of that prelim work has been done in LOTE²?

J:

Years 7 and 8, yeah. (pp. 553–558)

I think at Year 10, it works very well because of, ‘cause students have had more exposure and these year 10’s are, it is an elective, so they are really ready to give it a good go. (Naomi, pp. 470–471)

This is notable because despite the apparent aim of language and content integration, the quotes above seem to validate the need for clear, explicit separation at times. Yet, the teachers also argue that this distinct, separate focus better facilitates the integration of language in later stages of the lesson by establishing, from the start, a ‘Japanese language’ context. Naomi explains,

I guess that we often do start off the period with some general [language] questions, so just to get students into Japanese mode and think about what they’re going to do on the weekend or what they have done. So some lead-in, some warm up. And so therefore they’re used to answering those in Japanese. Later on in the class, if they’re asked something, they might just answer in English because they’re not thinking that this is ‘Japanese time’, maybe. (pp. 46–52)

However, despite the initial focus on Japanese in the start of the lesson and the overall context being one where Japanese was positioned as the default expectation for the majority of classroom discourse, English often did feature prominently, and very deliberately, at the end of each lesson. The earlier vignette (Stimulus 1) was one clear example. When asked about this use of English Jason explained it afforded alternate opportunities to emphasize and make explicit the ‘learning’ (in terms of conceptual material) that had been covered in that lesson through Japanese:

J: I was trying to establish with them, in terms of what they’d been aiming to achieve and what they might have achieved. So when putting it into English, I was still trying to use my Japanese to talk about it, so in a way that’s actually also assisting with a kind of process of transferal between the two languages.

I think if I’m using Japanese about those outcomes, asking them questions about it, and they’re actually picking up: ‘Okay, so he’s asking me about this outcome, and I’ll try and answer in Japanese ‘cause he’s using Japanese as well.’ (pp. 340–346)

Nevertheless both teachers were judicious in their English usage during the lesson to maximize the use of Japanese. As Naomi relates below, there was an expectation from students that teachers addressed them in Japanese by default:

One student came in and he asked me how was my weekend. It was before the class, so we can kind of have a little chitchat. And he asked me, ‘Oh, how was your weekend?’ And I said, ‘Oh yeah, it was good.’ And because he asked me in English, so I kind of naturally answered in English as well. And suddenly he said, ‘Oh, it’s CLIL time. Only Japanese!’ (Naomi, pp. 300–334)

The teachers’ priority was therefore on having the general classroom context one where Japanese was the default expectation for teacher–student interaction:

R:

There’s no insistence that you speak English?

J:

No, there hasn’t been, they’ve been positive in that way. I haven’t had anyone sort of get upset with me … so the expectation has been there that I will be using Japanese, and the Assistant Teacher as well. (pp. 188–191)

Yet, the same expectation did not apply to students, and the majority of English used within lessons was generated by the learners themselves. This is not to suggest that all student language was English (with the exception, e.g. of the Japanese language focus that began each lesson) but, rather, the integrated content/language focus during the main body of lesson produced an interesting context for the students’ use of Japanese – especially during content-focused tasks, as discussed below.

Japanese language use during content focused tasks

The dynamic between ‘using’ language and ‘doing’ content by students was complex. As noted above, although there was no compulsion to use Japanese except to produce ‘products’ for specific tasks (e.g. a completed worksheet or presentation), the broader space created through the integration of content and language during the main body of the lesson was one that the teachers described as being much richer for engaging students with language than their typical ‘language’ lessons.

In contrast to a traditional language-specific lesson where students might be required to ‘use’ the target language whenever language was to be spoken during the lesson, the content-oriented focus within the main part of the curriculum integrated lesson engaged students with ‘language use’ in more indirect terms:

It seems like a bit of a childish thing to be putting magnets on a map, but that’s actually one of the most interesting ones for the groups I sense, because every time that you put the magnetic map there, all four of them usually would gather around and be sticking magnets on, and they’re really interested in that. So it’s just a different way of looking at the vocabulary, because all of the names are in katakana. And then they’ve gone through and attempted to identify all of the countries in their booklets. (Jason, pp. 237–244)

I think they’ve touched on superlatives before, but [this integrated] activity which really brings it home … It was probably the one that took the longest out of all of the workstations, but I think it’s one that they actually enjoyed in the end. (Jason, pp. 264–269)

Perhaps, most crucially this dynamic afforded a context that teachers perceived the students as having greater ownership and creativity over language when it was used, compared to their previous experiences of working with them in the Languages domain. In the following task, for example, students worked in groups to use different sources of information (e.g. a website, advertisement and brochure) to identify places and activities suited to specific tourist profiles (adventure, cultural, environmental and economic). They were required to then transfer that information into a one-minute voicemail for a Japanese contact:

Stimulus example 3: rusubandenwa tasku (Workbook page, p. 24)

Naomi watched herself while the video was played back and, with the students focused on what they had to do – to sort through the information and decide what details they wanted to leave in the voicemail – she described her own role in this activity as largely ‘reactionary’: hovering around until being called over, when students would then ask for very specific information based to what they had decided for themselves was worth saying. Comparing this to tasks in the regular Japanese language class, she reflected:

[In the regular class] it’s just doing exercises and drill, drill, drill … it can be a little bit more passive … [With CLIL] it’s more fun and they try to use Japanese as much as possible. And although they don’t ‘understand’, they can still ‘think’. (Naomi, pp. 166–177)

This is probably best exemplified in an event during the final lesson of the unit, involving a student presentation. Students were required to construct an itinerary – including modes of transportation, places, and suitable activities in each location – corresponding with a profile assigned to each group (Stimulus example 4):

Jason takes his seat at the rear of the room and signals that it is time to start. In groups, boys begin to present their itineraries that they had been working on for the past few lessons; a summative task requiring them to piece together the different skills, knowledge, and language they had developed throughout the unit. Over the course of the lesson, each student contributes something to the suite of group presentations, with contributions varying widely in linguistic accuracy and complexity. What was notable, however, was the amount of language produced, with some presentations lasting as long as ten minutes with none any shorter than five. All content was in the target language, with students having made their own decisions about what to include (and therefore say) in their itinerary, other than the opening phrase which was provided as a ‘set’ expression – ‘minasan, kyō nihon tsuā gurūpu ni tsuite hanashitai to omoimasu’ (‘Today, I’d like to speak to you about the Japan Group Tour’) – true to the genre of public speaking in Japanese which relies on highly stylized, formulaic turns. Itineraries included catching the bullet train to the folk village of Takayama, flying from the main island to Sapporo, trying traditional Japanese lunches, ski and snowboard holidays, staying in Japanese inns, visiting tea houses, hiking, and the list went on – no two groups were alike. While not always linguistically accurate, the boys focused on presenting their own ideas as it related to the task at hand. This is one excerpt from the task, with the student pointing to images on his group’s PowerPoint slide as he explained what they had planned:

Table

Marko: ētō ichigatsu nijūrokunichi, ōsaka ni tsukimasu. hoteru ni ikimasu. hoteru de rirakkusu o shimasu. resutoran de oishii tabemono o tabemasu.	Marko: Um, on January 26th you’ll arrive in Osaka. You’ll go to the hotel. You can relax at the hotel and can have delicious food at the restaurant.
ichigatsu nijūhachi … nijūshichinichi asa ni totemo yūmei ōsakajō ni ikimasu. sorekara kaiyūkan ni ikimasu. soshite hoteru ni kaette, bangohan o tabemasu.	On January 28 … 27th, you’ll visit the famous Osaka Castle in the morning. After that, you’ll visit Osaka Aquarium and then return to the hotel for dinner.
ichigatsu nijūhachi, kyō hoteru de asagohan o tabemasu. sorekara unibāsaru sutajio tēma pāku ni ikimasu. unibāsaru sutajio tēma pāku de rōrākōsutā　o norimasu. yoru ni dōtonbori ni ikimasu.	On January 28th you’ll have breakfast at the hotel. After that you’ll go to to Universal Studio Theme Park. You’ll be able to ride the roller coaster at the theme park. That evening you’ll go to the Dontonbori Tourist district.

Stimulus example 4: Student presentation (non-standard syntax is underlined).

While watching these presentations played back, Naomi’s attention was drawn to the students’ use of language beyond that covered in class:

I think in CLIL if students are so enthusiastic and if they want to, maybe they can go even further – that’s why maybe some students used those vocab and grammar that they haven’t learnt in the lesson. (Naomi, pp. 576–578)

Thus, returning to a point made earlier, once the language focus was set up at the start of the lesson as ‘enablers’ for students to then find their ‘entry point’ into the content being studied, the core of the lesson – i.e. where the main focus moves to content, and away from more direct attention to language – afforded a platform for students to produce and be creative with language on their own terms. Their object, then, becomes one of transforming their understandings into language that they could use, rather than language as something ‘performed on cue.’

Indeed, it was this unscripted quality of student language that most impressed the teachers. Naomi commented that although she noticed students used language incorrectly at times, ‘still, I’m glad that they tried to use it’ (pp. 525–526). The focus was therefore away from linguistic accuracy, to what the students are actually trying to say through Japanese. As she reflects on another lesson (see stimulus 3):

Maybe with Year 9, I know all answers and I know everything, you know what I mean? [… but with the] CLIL task, there are suitable answers, but not definite, ‘This is the right answer,’ or ‘This is wrong.’ Or maybe students can create the things, especially what we did in today’s class, those leaving a message, and they need to sort of give more information about the one area. But they don’t, there is some direction what they need to say, but it’s not definite, like ‘Oh, you should say this word.’ They can be more creative. (pp. 136–152)

The content seemed to provide a fertile ‘sandpit’ where Japanese was not positioned as ‘language as object’ that students could accept – or reject – but as a tool that is subtly worked in through content-based tasks to engage students at another, more indirect level. In the same way, teachers made decisions about when to use English, students seemed to set their own rules on when and how they would use Japanese, leading to what these teachers perceived as higher, more genuine levels of engagement because language was then being used in the ways ‘they wanted to’. In response to similar events during playback, Jason observed:

I think just because the context of the unit is that you’re looking at why people go where they do, because the geography is in terms of the location of things, and that language of why, and explaining why, is really important, and so we’ve emphasised that probably right from the start – talking about why do people go to France, for a start. Today the students just started to volunteer [in Japanese] why they were interested in going to particular places in Japan … I think that was a breakthrough. (Jason, pp. 130–136)

To further understand where language sits relative to other elements constituting this integrated ecology – and action and agency within the space, in particular (Van Lier, 2000) – Norton’s construct of investment becomes especially useful: the extent to which students engage in language learning beyond a desire to simply acquire the linguistic code, than the social and material resources that learning a language then opens up to them which aligns with their identity as a learner (Norton, 2013; Norton-Pierce, 1995). Toohey and Norton (2010; see also Norton & Toohey, 2011) discuss the power of this construct to explain why a highly-motived student might nevertheless show little progress in language development due to a lack of investment in the target language community, given perceptions of that community being, for example, sexist, racist, or elitist. In the present case, Norton’s concept of investment helps to account for the opposite: boys – who might otherwise have no desire or interest in learning Japanese (Carr & Pauwels, 2006) – who are instead invested in what geography affords within that integrated space; engagement in language, as a necessary condition for language development (Lantolf & Thorne, 2006), through investment via content. As a surprised Naomi comments in response to another lesson incident,

There was one boy who was using the computer. He is a little bit weaker compared to other students, but I was pretty surprised that he was looking at the Japanese website. He said like, ‘Oh, it’s all in Japanese, so I don’t know,’ but he was still trying to find some information! (Naomi, pp. 281–284)

Discussion and moving towards new conclusions on pedagogic integration

Perhaps among the most interesting issues to emerge from this analysis of content and language integration was, ironically, the separation of language and content that seemed important during various phases of curriculum delivery; reflecting a similar tendency noted with teaching in immersion programmes (Cammarata & Tedick, 2012). For example, lessons began with a deliberate, clear focus on vocabulary and grammar that would be required for the lesson; conversely, the ends of lessons introduced a ‘new’ language tool (English) that had otherwise been outside of ‘integrated’ focus up to that point. Similarly, this focus on one or the other – language or content – seemed to oscillate throughout lessons; for example, having ‘done’ the language focus at the start of the lesson, there seemed to be a shift to content-based tasks for the remainder of the lesson in which English was permitted by students (and, also to some extent, teachers, to keep the lesson moving), with accuracy in Japanese language not a primary concern.

This raises the possibility of whether the curriculum unit might be revised to bring about a more integrated focus in future attempts at using this approach (i.e. a greater language and content integrated focus at every stage of the lesson), but it also raises the question of whether a constant language/content integrated focus is, in fact, necessary or even desirable. I would concur with Mohan’s (1986, p. 62) assertion that ‘linguistic content is inseparable from linguistic expression’; at least in the sense that, holistically, there is a clear dependency between both to ensure genuine meaning (Dalton-Puffer, 2007, p. 6). But what is perhaps less clear at a pedagogical level is what this might mean for phasing separate sections and cycles within a lesson, or indeed even entire lessons comprising a unit of work within the curriculum. Is there always a need to ensure a focus on both? Or can the pedagogy be enhanced even further with certain phases and moves being identified that are best structured to have a separate more explicit, clearly focus on one over the other?

Although curriculum evaluation was not the focus of this study and is beyond the scope of this article, anecdotal evidence from the teachers’ own assessment of the group via student learning diaries suggests the unit achieved a number of positive outcomes, including high levels of student engagement and positive language gains compared to students following the regular language programme at this level. Given the range of contextual factors that might impact on how CLIL principles can be applied across different classroom settings, these findings at least raise the important possibility of having to reconsider what is meant conceptually by ‘integration’, and how language and content might work as mediatory tools within and across the curriculum more broadly to bring about similar outcomes, but without necessarily having to maintain a strict or constant integrated focus on both at all each point of delivery.

What became apparent in the use of tools within this study, for example, was that content produced a space for students to learn about language in a way that was contextualized, purposeful, and created opportunities for new forms of investment (Norton, 2013; Norton & Toohey, 2011; Norton-Pierce, 1995; Toohey & Norton, 2010). Rather than a situation where students ‘had’ to use language in ‘a’ particular way, as might typically be the case in a language-as-object oriented classroom, the space created by the content focus was one where students could move in and out of the other language. This allowed them to think about both the ideas being discussed, and language being used, to then make their own, creative choices on what and how to use language themselves (Cross, 2012).

Such findings also raise questions on the need for the conventional separation between languages within language-/content-integrated settings. The ‘two solitudes assumption’ (Cummins, 2007) – the argument for clear boundaries between the use of the L1 and L2 – has long been contentious (e.g. Atkinson, 1987; Auerbach, 1993; Cook, 2001), with findings from Liang and Mohan (2003) suggesting that ‘if content learned in L2 is dealt with in L2 and not discussed and shared in L1, it is difficult for L2 students to simultaneously develop academic discourse in both languages’ (p. 47). Yet, the debate has sat at the periphery of mainstream arguments about effective practice, dominated instead by cognitivist arguments for maximizing comprehensible input via target language exposure afforded by the curriculum (Block, 2003; Krashen, 1981).

Indeed, the debate has been largely absent within the content/language integrated literature thus far (Lasagabaster, 2013). Dalton-Puffer’s (2007) analyses of speech acts within real-life CLIL settings finds that the L1 is sometimes (minimally) present, seemingly tied to language for regulatory functions and that of the institutional culture, rather than for curriculum content or related instructional language (mainly in the L2). What remains less clear is how it might support integrated approaches to learning. It was apparent in this study, for example, that the teacher’s use of the L1 was both disciplined and purposeful. Given that sociocultural accounts of language acquisition now recognize the potential of the rich linguistic tools that learners (and teachers) bring the pedagogical relationship (Cummins, 2007, 2008; Lantolf, 2000), including translanguaging (Creese & Blackledge, 2010; Garcia, 2009), it seems credible to search for ways to better acknowledge languages across the curriculum as a tool to more productively scaffold communicative development, as well as its impact for improving students’ content knowledge and conceptual development.

Gregory (2008), for example, draws on syncretism – the ‘infusing and blending skills and approaches’ (Robertson, 2004, p. 175) – to demonstrate the impact of language hybridization upon literacy, and the power of an ‘inside/outside’ programme that connects learners’ experience with plurilingual resources to support empowered new forms of language practice. The ecology of the content and language integrated space in the present paper was one that afforded student agency to draw on, extend, and appropriate English or Japanese as they saw fit for purpose (Gregory, 2008, pp. 19, 25). The negotiation of power within any learning space is significant, but even more so when there is an interplay between language(s) and identity-work – including finding one’s own ‘voice’ (Bakhtin, 1981) – involving not only learner and teacher, but also ‘face’ before other students (Bargiela-Chiappini & Haugh, 2010), and between the learner and their imagined language community (Norton, 2001; Pavlenko & Norton, 2007). Cummins (2000) highlights the importance of this in his distinction between coercive and collaborative power relations that often arise in culturally and linguistically diverse spaces for learning. While the former works to the ‘detriment of a subordinated individual’ (p. 44), the latter generates a sense of enablement to ‘achieve more’:

Students whose schooling experiences reflect collaborative relations of power participate confidently in instruction as a result of the fact that their sense of identity is being affirmed and extended in their interactions with educators. They also know that their voices will be heard and respected within the classroom. Schooling amplifies rather than silences their power of self-expression. (p. 44, original emphasis)

These conclusions therefore lend weight to arguments that have already begun to emerge for a recognition of multiple languages in developing more elaborate and enriched practices in literacy (Edwards, 2009; Gregory, 2008; Gregory, Long, & Volk, 2004); especially for global classrooms with increasingly diverse student demographics and complex sociolinguistic profiles (Langford, 2012). The findings advance those arguments further still, and the possible implications they also carry beyond language and literacy for the wider curriculum as they relate to discipline specific areas. Indeed, if the contribution of the language across the curriculum movement since the 1970s has been increased sensitivity to the literacy demands that underscore different curriculum domains – be they scientific, historical, musical, etc. – then understanding of how those disciplines can be understood, and developed, from the perspective of multiple language resources in the same curriculum space is also ripe for renewed consideration.

Notes on contributor

Russell Cross is a senior lecturer in Language and Literacy Education at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education. With a background in bilingual and immersion education, his research focuses on the sociocultural, historical and political nature of teachers’ work and knowledge.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Pseudonyms have been used throughout the paper for all identifiers to maintain anonymity.

2. Languages Other Than English (the curriculum label for Japanese).