Expressing evaluation across disciplines in primary and secondary CLIL writing: a longitudinal study

ABSTRACT

The construct of cognitive discourse functions (CDFs) has been proposed as a bridge between linguists and educationalists, linking ‘subject specific cognitive learning goals with the linguistic representations they receive in classroom interaction’ (Dalton-Puffer 2013. “A Construct of Cognitive Discourse Functions for Conceptualising Content-Language Integration in Q4 CLIL Multilingual Education.” EuJAL 1 (2): 216–253, 220). We focus on the CDF evaluate, using the Appraisal model to analyze evaluative language in a longitudinal corpus of student texts written in L2 English across disciplines (natural science, history, art), collected from the same students at the end of primary school (aged 11+) and at the beginning and end of secondary year 2 (aged 13–14). We trace students' control of meaning-making resources for the CDF evaluate across disciplines and over time through their ability to ‘couple’ interpersonal, or evaluative, meanings with their ideational, or field-specific knowledge. The findings show some development towards appropriate field + evaluation couplings, and suggest ways teachers can focus students' attention on the language of evaluation across disciplines, aiding development of cognitive discourse competence. Our study further supports the contributions of Systemic Functional Linguistics to educational contexts, as the Appraisal framework discriminates types of evaluation for creating disciplinary knowledge.

KEYWORDS:

• Content and language integrated learning (CLIL)
• appraisal
• everyday/disciplinary knowledge
• writing

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the students who wrote the texts, their teachers, and especially the heads of the schools; without them this study would not have been possible. Grateful thanks to Mick O’Donnell for UAM Corpustool and for his invaluable help. This paper is part of a project that was funded by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad: Integrating and assessing content and language in the transition from primary to secondary bilingual education TRANS-CLIL (MINECO, FFI2014-55590-R) (Past projects financed by MINECO and CAM/UAM.). Project webpage: http://www.uam-clil.org

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Voices of CLIL teachers in seminars with the authors; see Cammarata and Tedick 2012 for voices from a different context.

2 To distinguish between technical and non-technical uses of terms, Appraisal systems are in small caps.

3 Student examples are presented verbatim. Tags read as in example 1: HIST-2nd-B-35: subject, primary/secondary, student group, student number.

4 The sub-corpus includes fewer texts on history at Time 1 (26 texts). As the three groups of students in the primary data collection alternated subject (history/biology) and language (English/Spanish), the combination of history in English was only written by one group, with the other two writing on ecology in English. For the secondary data, collected as students were starting grade 8 (history: 47 texts) and at the end of that year (art: 49 texts), all students did the tasks in both languages.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad: [grant number MINECO, FFI2014-55590-R].

Notes on contributors

Rachel Whittaker

Rachel Whittaker is honorary lecturer in the English Department of the Universidad Autónoma, Madrid, and is active in teacher education for CLIL and EFL, her areas of research. Co-founder of the UAM-CLIL research group (uam-clil.org), she is co-author of The Roles of Language in CLIL (2012, CUP), a book on language use and development in CLIL classes. She recently co-edited a monograph of Lenguaje y Textos (2017) on a project she coordinated, which brought the Australian literacy pedagogy, Reading to Learn, to Spain. She has published a number of articles and chapters on CLIL and EFL student writing and on Reading to Learn and its results.

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), and An Introduction to Linguistics and Language Studies (Equinox); she is currently completing a monograph titled A Functional Perspective on Developing Language (Routledge).