Trans/languaging and the triadic dialogue in content and language integrated learning (CLIL) classrooms

ABSTRACT

There has been a rich literature on the role of language in learning and on its role in knowledge (co-)construction in the science classroom. This literature, rooted in social semiotics theories and sociocultural theories, discussed research conducted largely in contexts where students are learning content in their first language (L1). In this paper, we draw on concepts from this literature to analyse science lessons in an L2 (second/foreign language) context and discuss how these concepts can be further built on and extended to understand the role of languaging and translanguaging in knowledge (co-)construction and academic language learning in CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) classrooms, where students are learning content in their L2.

KEYWORDS:

• Dialogic pedagogy
• thematic patterns
• science teaching
• content and language integrated learning
• the triadic dialogue

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the reviewers and the editor for their very useful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper. The authors also thank Ms Karen Lai for her assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In this paper, we conceptualise CLIL as an umbrella term, which incorporates a variety of programme alternatives, sharing the view of Cenoz, Genesee and Gorter (2014) that ‘authentic content that extends beyond language be used as a vehicle for L2/foreign language teaching and learning’ (13). These programme alternatives include immersion programmes, English-medium education and content-based instruction, to name a few.

2. Owing to limited space, we could not explicate each of these semantic relations and strategies in detail, but we hope our data analysis below will illustrate them in greater detail (see Lemke's Talking Science 1990 for details).

3. This sentence structure is similar to what science educators would call ‘structure/function’ (Cheng and Gilbert 2015) (e.g. we need structure A for function X). However, as our paper adopted Lemke's (1990) framework, we classified this as ‘process/reason’.

4. Even if students have not encountered this L1 academic term before, the meaning of the term is rather transparent. It is composed of three Chinese characters literally meaning ‘horn’, ‘material’ and ‘layer’, which should help students to understand the meaning of ‘keratin’.