Description
Question/answer task on Foreign Language classroom interaction involving more analysis than writing (so I need a person from the field). Instructions: See document entitled task 4’s questions Find attached the course description and text to work on (task 4) I will provide part of the course materials to make the work easier. Subject: The language of disciplines in foreign language classrooms MA in English Applied Linguistics I will go for the most affordable price because I have 5 similar tasks with very limited funds. ThanksUsing a genre-based approach to integrating content and language in CLIL
The example of secondary history
Tom Morton
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
This chapter proposes that a genre-based pedagogy could provide at least a partial framework for a language curriculum in CLIL. It starts from the idea that an important aspect of learning an academic subject is that of being a user of the different text types or genres through which the subject knowledge is construed. In a genre-based pedagogy, teachers and students jointly construct content knowledge along with the textual and linguistic forms in which it is packaged, thus linking the oral discourse through which knowledge is construed with the written genres which students may have to produce. Such an approach is particularly relevant for CLIL, as it provides a way of genuinely integrating content and language instruction. The chapter provides examples from secondary CLIL history lessons, but it is argued that a genre-based approach can be suitable across subject areas, and is compatible with the 4 Cs perspective on CLIL.
1. Introduction
One of the problems facing current CLIL practice is the need for specific curricula for language development across the various subjects taught. As Dalton-Puffer (2007) argues, the most urgent need is that for the identification and implementation of written and spoken academic language skills and functions. She claims that these should include not only such functions as describing, defining and explaining, but also “a progression of narrative, descriptive, informative, argumentative, and persuasive texts” (ibid. 295, italics added). In the approach to the literacies of school subjects based on systemic functional linguistics (e.g. Cope & Kalantzis 1993; Martin 1999; Schleppegell & Colombi 2002; Schleppegrell 2004) such texts are referred to as ‘genres’. The aim of this chapter is to show some ways in which this systemic-functional notion of genre (Martin & Rose 2008; Martin 2009) can provide a framework for the development of language curricula in CLIL, and for informing classroom practices. The examples are taken from one
Tom Morton
commonly taught CLIL subject, history, but it is suggested that the approach described can be applied, with modifications, to other CLIL subjects.
The chapter begins with some background on the notion of genre, and on how a genre-based pedagogy has been used in other educational contexts. In the central part of the chapter, data drawn from a study of CLIL classrooms in Spain are used to illustrate how elements of a genre-based pedagogy might be of benefit in CLIL instruction in secondary history. The chapter concludes by showing how using elements of a genre-based pedagogy can be linked to a 4 Cs approach to CLIL (Coyle, Hood & Marsh 2010). The main argument is that an understanding of genres can both show what it is that CLIL students have to achieve in terms of mastering discipline-specific texts, and provide a scaffolding structure for the joint construction of meaning in CLIL classrooms. While the focus of genre-based pedagogy has generally been on the production of written texts, it is argued that the process of joint construction of meaning as part of the “learning-teaching cycle” (Rothery 1996) can guide the production of oral discourse in CLIL classrooms.
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. Genre and subject-specific literacy
As Luke, Freebody and Land (2000: 111) point out, disciplines such as science, history and social studies do not exist as we know them independently of their texts. In this way, they claim, the study of an academic discipline is a discourse practice. By participating in the practices typical of the subject and adopting the appropriate roles, for example by examining and analysing the veracity of sources in history instruction, students gain a “grasp of practice” (Ford & Forman 2006). In participating in such disciplinary practices, students will be positioned in the role of “text user” (Freebody 1992). They should be able to use texts functionally by
knowing about and acting on the different cultural and social functions that various texts perform both inside and outside school and knowing that these functions shape the way texts are structured, their tone, their degree of formality and their sequence of components. (Luke, Freebody & Land 2000: 29)
However, using subject-specific texts functionally presents certain challenges in second and foreign language contexts in which “knowledge of the language in which genres are composed cannot be assumed” (Martin 2009: 16). Martin goes on to point out that, in these contexts, “discussing the relation of lexis, grammar, and discourse structure to genre is inescapable – since the lower level resources have to be brought to consciousness and taught” (ibid.). This call for explicit teaching of lexicogrammar in relation to discourse structure contrasts with ‘language bath’ approaches to CLIL in which language learning is simply assumed to happen by osmosis.
Using a genre-based approach to integrating content and language in CLIL
Some of the arguments put forward in support of CLIL, at least as far as the second ‘L’ is concerned, would seem to suggest that it is influenced by what Bernstein (1996) described as a “competence” approach to pedagogy, in which learning is seen as a tacit process, with weak framing of the selection, grading and pacing of content (in this case, the ‘content’ being language). In this approach, teachers’ main role is to facilitate the learning process and manage the learning context (Leung 2001: 42). As Leung (2001) and Creese (2005) point out, this approach has proved problematic in other contexts in which learners study subject matter in an additional language, such as schools in England in which English as an additional language (EAL) learners are mainstreamed into content classes. Byrnes (2009) shows that another approach that attempts to integrate content and language learning, content-based instruction (CBI) in the United States, “has often drawn on experiential knowledge that is short on principled approaches to language learning and teaching” (ibid. 1).
One principled way in which attention can be focused on the texts intrinsic to the practices in school subjects taught through CLIL is to use the concept of genre as developed in systemic functional linguistics. According to Martin and Rose, genres are
staged, goal oriented social processes. Staged, because it usually takes us more than one step to reach our goals; goal oriented because we feel frustrated if we don’t accomplish the final steps (…); social because writers shape their texts for readers of particular kinds. (Martin & Rose 2008: 6)
They go on to point out that genres “enact the social practices of a given culture” (ibid.). In the case of learning academic subjects, including in CLIL contexts, an important aspect of ‘culture’ is that of the discipline being studied. In learning school science, for example, students may have to understand and/or produce genres such as different types of reports (descriptive, classifying and compositional) or procedural recounts which report on observations or experiments (Martin & Rose 2008). These genres cannot be seen in isolation from the oral language through which the content and procedural knowledge they express is construed. As Gibbons (2006: 32–36) explains, learners working in an L2 move along a “mode continuum” from more context-embedded spoken language to written texts which are more distanced from the original events in which they participated (see also Martin 1984). Thus, for example, CLIL learners may carry out a science experiment in which they use oral discourse as part of the activity, but may later have to produce a written procedural recount of the same experiment.
In order to be competent ‘text users’ of these genres in Freebody and Luke’s
terms, students will need, following the definition of genre above, to have a grasp of their purposes, the stages through which they are constructed and how they
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are variously shaped for different audiences. For example, in producing a procedural recount in school science, students need to be aware of these three aspects of the genre: its purpose in reporting on the steps of an investigation to an audience who was not present; the different stages (purpose, equipment and materials ^ method ^ results ^ (conclusion))1; and the shaping for the audience involved in the use of ‘impersonal’ or ‘agentless’ types of language such as passives.
3
. Genre-based pedagogy
Proponents of a genre approach to school literacy in the ‘Sydney School’ of systemic functional linguistics have been developing a pedagogy for increasing students’ awareness and control of a range of genres important to their learning of school subjects such as history and science since the late 80’s and 90’s (e.g. Cope & Kalantzis 1993; Johns 2002; Martin 1999, 2009; Martin & Rose 2008). The main objective of this pedagogy is to make explicit the stages and linguistic features of key school genres and guide students in the production of these important text types.
An important principle in this pedagogy is that such school genres are keys to powerful and prestigious discourses in society, and that by denying students access to them by, for example advocating certain types of progressive, constructivist or process pedagogies, we may be doing a disservice to disadvantaged students (see Martin & Rose 2008: 226–229 for a recent discussion of these issues). The present chapter, while acknowledging this sociopolitical dimension of genre pedagogy, emphasizes more the importance of scaffolding English language learners’ access to the relevant text types in the subjects they are studying in CLIL, and integrating language work within this framework. In this sense, it builds on previous work which has highlighted the importance of an awareness of genre and rhetorical features of texts and the language used to construe knowledge in CLIL classrooms (for an example see Morgan 1999).
The genre-based pedagogy developed by the Sydney School researchers
(Martin 1999, 2002; Rothery 1996) consists of a ‘teaching/learning cycle’ in which students are guided towards control and a critical appreciation of genres through the stages of deconstruction, joint construction and independent construction. In the deconstruction stage, students’ awareness is raised of the purposes, stages and linguistic features of the genre. In the joint construction phase, students and teacher together build a representative example of the genre in question.
. In genre notation, the symbol ^ means ‘followed by’.
Using a genre-based approach to integrating content and language in CLIL
Throughout this process, teacher and students are jointly building ‘field knowledge’, i.e. the relevant content that will be ‘packaged’ in the genre under construction. In the independent construction stage, students prepare their own examples of the genre. While this can be seen as a temporal, three-stage process, Martin (1999: 127) points out that this instruction can begin at any point, depending on the needs of the students.
Importantly for CLIL contexts, a genre-based approach provides a framework for the types of productive teacher-student (and student-student) spoken interaction which it is hoped will take place in CLIL or content-based instruction, and which may not always occur (Musumeci 1996; Dalton-Puffer 2007).
A key concept is “guidance through interaction in the context of shared experience” (Martin 1999: 126). Throughout the processes of building field knowledge, and deconstructing and constructing relevant genres, teachers and students will be involved in interactions in which they explore not only the meanings relevant to the specific content being studied, but also the forms in which this content can best be communicated. Analysing such interactions according to the three register dimensions of field, tenor and mode (Martin 1999: 133–141; Martin &
Rose 2008: 11–16) can throw light on the ways in which such interaction can be productive for learning in CLIL.
In terms of field, students and teachers gather information and move from commonsense to uncommonsense knowledge about disciplinary content. Information, rather than being organised in ‘horizontal’ or loosely organised structures (Bernstein 1999) may be organised according to taxonomies which can involve classification or composition (Martin 2007). In terms of tenor, or the interpersonal dimension of language use, the teacher can shape the ongoing construction of knowledge by the use of certain linguistic and interactional options such as asking questions, pausing, or providing prompts and cues. The mode dimension can best be understood as conscious attention to the role of language and discourse in packaging the information, for example in moving along the mode continuum from the more context-embedded spoken forms to the expression of academic knowledge in writing (Gibbons 2006).
Thus, a genre-based pedagogy informing a language curriculum for CLIL pays attention not only to the formal features of the text types which constitute disciplinary knowledge, but by also incorporating the notion of register, allows us to focus on the processes through which content learning is scaffolded (Hammond