https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6826-1253
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ABSTRACT
The ability to manage specific forms of disciplinary expression – Languages of Schooling – is regarded as a factor of academic success (Council of Europe recommendations – Council of Europe CM/Rec. [2014]. Recommendation of the Committee of Ministers to Member States on the Importance of Competences in the Language(s) of Schooling for Equity and Quality in Education and for Educational Success. Accessed December 25, 2018. https://search.coe.int/cm/Pages/result_details.aspx?ObjectID=09000016805c6105). One of the core discursive functions students perform across academic subjects is defining, which is part of the inventory of descriptors for the language of schooling (e.g. Beacco [2010]. Items for a Description of Linguistic Competence in the Language of Schooling Necessary for Teaching/Learning History (End of Obligatory Education). Strasbourg: Language Policy Division, Council of Europe). This study addresses defining as a component of the language of schooling by which CLIL students express specialized knowledge across languages, educational levels and fields (see Coffin [2006b]. Historical Discourse. The Language of Time, Cause and Evaluation. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, Continuum). We elicited, analysed and compared students’ written definitions in English (L2) and Spanish (L1) of two different historical fields in primary (6th grade) and secondary (8th grade). For this purpose, we applied an analysis scheme that merges Trimble’s ([1985]. English for Science and Technology: A Discourse Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) definitional construct and Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday and Matthiessen [2014]. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Hodder; Martin [2013]. “Embedded Literacy: Knowledge as Meaning.” Linguistics and Education 24: 23–37). Our results show that while students produced more definitions in English in the higher educational level, the differences in their realizations are attributed more to the field being defined. The study has also shown no differences in the frequency and type of definitions across languages.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. This project has received support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (FFI2014-55590-R).
2. To manage the logistics of the data collection for the project, the students who wrote about history in English wrote about science in Spanish, and those who wrote about history in Spanish wrote about science in English. The study at hand focuses only on definitions in the history data.
3. The history data in English is comparable across educational levels as 26 out of the 27 primary school students who responded to the prompt in English were streamed into the high-exposure group in the secondary school under study, where history was also taught in English. The remaining students from the secondary school data (6) came from other bilingual primary schools in the area.
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Notes on contributors
Nashwa Nashaat-Sobhy
Nashwa Nashaat-Sobhy is Assistant professor in the Department of Applied Linguistics at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV). Her research activities focus on teaching and learning in content and language integrated contexts (CLIL and EMI). She is Member of the UAM-CLIL research group at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and GALE at UPV.
Ana Llinares
Ana Llinares is Professor in the English department at the 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.