‘Do you know Actimel?’ The adaptive nature of dialogic teacher-led discussions in the CLIL science classroom: a case study

Abstract

This interpretive case study is framed within recent sociocultural conceptualisations of learning. It draws on research on teacher-led classroom discussions, and investigates the conversational intricacies through which ‘dialogicity’ is accomplished in adaptive ways in one content and language integrated learning (CLIL) science classroom. Multimodal conversation analysis (CA) is performed in order to describe how classroom interactional competence (CIC) is enacted by participants while developing a teacher-led discussion. The data come from a bilingual Catalan-Spanish secondary school classroom in Barcelona in which 16 12-year-old students learn biology in English as a third language. The analysis reveals that: (a) the teacher's systematic deployment of multimodal resources ensures comprehension and favours the emergence of learner-initiated turns; (b) as a result, a highly interwoven set of sequences of ‘mediation’ and ‘remediation’ occurs, jointly providing the students with opportunities for the appropriation of language and content; and (c) this abundance of resources contrasts with the scarcity of teacher moves aimed at eliciting more elaborated learner interventions. The study contributes to further understanding of the relationship between language, interaction and learning. It also shows how multimodal CA may offer valuable tools for tracing the process of integrated learning.

Notes

1. The term ‘explanation’ is not used in this article to refer to a specific discourse function. Rather, we employ it in a broad sense as in colloquial statements like ‘s/he explains things really well’ (Dalton-Puffer 2007: 141).

2. R+D+i project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. Ref. EDU2010-15783.

3. Information on research by CLIL-SI and teaching materials is available at http://grupsderecerca.uab.cat/clilsi.

4. This suggests that a shift in the criteria for the recruitment and training of CLIL teachers is needed. In Spain, the only official requirements to become a CLIL teacher are a degree in the subject matter and a B2 in the target language.

5. Although group size is also a plausible explanation, our extensive knowledge of Spanish classrooms leads us to consider it a less likely one.

6. An apparently paradoxical finding previously identified by Dalton-Puffer (2007) and Gajo (2007).