Cognitive discourse functions in CLIL classrooms: eliciting and analysing students’ oral categorizations in science and history

ABSTRACT

Embedded in a Systemic Functional understanding of education as an initiation into knowledge structures and specific activities, both of which are fundamentally mediated by language, this paper addresses one of the critical concerns around CLIL: a possible mismatch between students’ cognitive level and their L2 proficiency. The focus is on acts of classifying, comparing and contrasting facts, objects, phenomena, abstract ideas and concepts. Such cognitive and verbal actions are key in the construction of specialist knowledge, having been bundled in an umbrella cognitive discourse function (CDF) categorize. To operationalize this CDF, we develop a conceptual map through an exploratory, data-driven analysis of an oral learner corpus in L2 English and L1 Spanish on science and history topics collected in primary bilingual schools in Madrid. We also use SFL tools to examine lexico-grammatical choices which students employ to realize categorize across the two subjects and languages. The analysis shows that students encounter a range of difficulties, both conceptual and linguistic, when forming complete and appropriate categorizations in both languages. The results obtained across subjects reveal clear subject-specific tendencies in how categorizing is carried out: comparing seems to be a defining figure of thought in history while classifications were predominant in science.

KEYWORDS:

• Content and language integrated learning (CLIL)
• cognitive discourse functions (CDF)
• systemic functional linguistics (SFL)
• subject-specific literacy
• classify
• compare

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors of this special issue for their insightful and constructive comments on previous versions of the article. Any remaining errors, omissions, and shortcomings are our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In Trimble’s taxonomy the original term was ‘basis’. To avoid any possible confusion in terminology, we opted to replace it with a more specific term ‘basis-of-classification’ when referring to the structural dimension of classifications while keeping the term ‘basis’ for the third parameter.

2 The scheme was built in the process of analysing the complete corpus, that is, spoken and written learner data from the bigger study described in section 3.

3 The data extracts were transcribed verbatim, thereby preserving all the original features of learner-produced oral data such as e.g., possible errors in lexico-grammar. English translations, however, have been standardized.

4 Identifiers of data extracts are structured as follows: subject (science/history) – language (en, sp) – group (gA/gB/gC) – student pair (p1 … n). This identifier (science-sp-gB-p10) thus reads: science, Spanish, group B, pair 10.

5 While the UAM Corpus Tool provides measures in terms of statistical significance, we follow the recommendations of Wasserstein, Schirm, and Lazar (2019) in referring to any apparent statistically significant values as only statistically detectable, especially given our small-sized samples and low frequencies.

6 ‘Era dos tipos de personas. La gente rica, que llevaba pues faldas así ((pretends to wear a skirt by using his hands)), lo de abajo muy gordo y muy apretado … Luego había otra gente que era un poco más pobre, pues que iba con camisas recortada, con un cinturón que era una cuerda, pues ropa por así decirlo, una basura.’ (‘There were two types of people. Rich people who wore skirts like that ((pretends to wear a skirt by using his hands)), the bottom part was very thick and very tight … Then there were other people who were a little bit poorer, because they were wearing short shirts with a belt that was a rope, well, garbage clothes, so to speak’, history-sp-gC-p10).

7 Based on the three fundamental semantic categories of doing, saying and being, the six process types do not divide the verbal lexicon into Aristotelian categories but shade into each other. Prototypical meanings of each category are: states of having an identity or attribute (relational processes), states of being/existing (existential processes), concrete and tangible actions (material processes), physiological and psychological events experienced by a conscious being (behavioural processes), thinking and feeling (mental processes), and verbal actions including symbolic exchanges of meaning (verbal processes) (Halliday and Matthiessen 2014).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades: [grant number RTI2018-094961-B-I00]; Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad: [grant number FFI2014-55590-R].

Notes on contributors

Natalia Evnitskaya

Natalia Evnitskaya is lecturer at the Institute for Multilingualism of Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (Barcelona). She is a member of Language and Education research group and UAM-CLIL research group. Her research interests are bilingualism, CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), classroom interaction, multimodality, teacher education, conversation analysis, and systemic functional linguistics. She published several articles and book chapters on these topics.

Christiane Dalton-Puffer

Christiane Dalton-Puffer is professor of English Linguistics at the University of Vienna. She is the author of Discourse in CLIL classrooms (Benjamins, 2007) and numerous journal articles. She has also edited books and journal issues on CLIL. Her current research focus is on how teachers and students use language to express facts and concepts in working towards the curricular learning goals of specialist subjects.