Systemic functional linguistics: the perfect match for content and language integrated learning

ABSTRACT

Recent debates on bilingual education/CLIL have insisted on the need to explore common aims across bilingual/multilingual education programmes (CLIL, CBI, immersion) instead of highlighting differences across them (e.g. Cenoz, Genesee & Gorter, 2014). One objective shared by all programmes, regardless of their specificities, is to find the ways in which content and language are best learnt and taught in integration. This involves going beyond the ‘focus on form’ perspective and looking at language as a meaning-making activity in relation to the genres and registers of specific classroom/academic disciplines. In this issue, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), with its focus on the purposes of language use through texts and contexts, is applied, together with other models, such as Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) or Cognitive Discourse Functions (CDFs), to the understanding of how language and content integration is enacted and its implications for curriculum development, pedagogy and assessment. The studies represent a variety of educational levels, content areas, modes (spoken, written, classroom interaction) and bilingual/multilingual education contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• SFL
• CLIL
• integration
• CDF
• LCT

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ana Llinares

Ana Llinares is Professor in the English department at the Madrid Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Her research interests include applications of systemic functional linguistics, pragmatics and classroom discourse analysis to CLIL primary and secondary school contexts. She has published widely on this topic and coordinates the UAM-CLIL research group (http://www.uam-clil.com).

Anne McCabe

Anne McCabe holds a joint appointment in the Departments of English and Communication at Saint Louis University’s Madrid Campus, where she teaches courses in rhetoric, academic writing, linguistics, public speaking, and ESL. She has published numerous articles and book chapters related to language teaching/learning using Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). She has also edited book collections, Language and Literacy: Functional Approaches and Advances in Language and Education (Bloomsbury, with Rachel Whittaker and Mick O’Donnell); she is currently completing a monograph titled A Functional Perspective on Developing Language (Routledge).