CLIL students’ production of cognitive discourse functions: Comparing Finnish and Spanish contexts

Abstract

This article presents findings from an empirical study in which we investigated Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) students’ linguistic resources in the L2 (English) to convey different Cognitive Discourse Functions (Dalton-Puffer 2013; 2016)—Describe, Compare (Categorize), Report, Evaluate and Explore—in two different contexts. The participants were primary school students (grade 6) participating in CLIL programs in Finland and Spain. To allow comparison, two sets of data were obtained by asking the students to write in response to a similar prompt in the area of social science (History in the Spanish context and Geography in the Finnish context). We compared the frequency of the Cognitive Discourse Functions (CDFs) produced, and the fluency and complexity of students’ realizations of CDFs, using tools of Systemic Functional Linguistics. The results reveal similarities across contexts in the frequency and extension of some of the CDFs produced, and differences in terms of CDF complexity, measured in students’ use of clause complexes, Appraisal resources and complex nominal groups to express different CDFs.

Keywords:

• CLIL
• SFL
• CDF

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Figure 1. Prompt for Spanish students.

Figure 2. Prompt for Finnish students.

Figure 3. Prompts for individual CDFs across contexts.

Figure 4. Response to the CDF prompts across contexts.

Figure 5. Number of words per CDF across contexts (Fluency).

Figure 6. Number of clauses per T-Unit across CDFs.

Figure 7. Distribution of complex nominal groups (NGs) across CDFs.

Notes

1 Categorize was incorporated as a new category by Evnitskaya and Dalton-Puffer (2023) in substitution of classify, which remained a subcategory of categorize.

2 The parts of the extracts in bold illustrate the use of subordinate clauses in each T-Unit

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (Spain). Ref: FFI2014-55590-R.