Volume 6, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Languages of Schooling: language competence and educational success / Guest Editors: Francisco Lorenzo and Oliver Meyer

It is now widely recognized among educators that explicit attention to language is necessary in order to optimize both language and content learning in situations, such as CLIL, where learners, teachers or both operate in a second language. However, the requirement of attention to language sits uneasily with the fact that content-subject specialist teachers frequently feel unprepared to think and operate in linguistic dimensions. In an attempt to create a conceptualisation that would speak to subject teachers in terms that are meaningful to them from within their own subjects, a Construct of Cognitive Discourse Functions (henceforth CDFs) has been proposed. This construct is theoretically founded in both educational curriculum theory and linguistic pragmatics and consists of a seven-fold categorization of verbalizations which express acts of thinking about subject matter in the classroom (CLASSIFY, DEFINE, DESCRIBE, EVALUATE, EXPLAIN, EXPLORE, REPORT). As the theoretical background of the CDF Construct has been discussed at length elsewhere (Dalton-Puffer 2013, 2016), it will be presented only briefly at the outset of this article. The main purpose of this contribution is to report on steps taken towards an empirical validation of the CDF Construct. A total of four smaller-scale studies each focusing on the classroom discourse in one subject (biology, physics, economics, history) will be surveyed in order to find answers to the questions of whether CDFs actually occur in classroom interaction and if they do, which and to what extent. Comparisons to a small complementary study on a set of EFL lessons will be made where appropriate. Results show that CDFs are indeed a staple of teaching and learning in classroom-based education but are in no way equally distributed. Also, they are almost never the object of conscious attention. As a number of further questions remain yet to be answered on the way towards empirical validation of a fully articulated CDF Construct, these will be discussed in the conclusion of the article.

This article gives two perspectives on an action-research literacy project based on the pedagogy of Reading to Learn (R2L). The project, organized in a cascade structure, introduced the functional linguistics-based pedagogy for reading and writing across the curriculum to national teams of key educators, who then took it to practising teachers, who used it with their pupils. The impact of the project on the three groups of 'learners' involved was then evaluated through questionnaires for educators and teachers and reading and writing tests. Knowledge of the texts of their subjects, and of the R2L interaction cycle, changed participants' practice, resulting in student inclusion and improved written production. The paper first presents a broad view of the project and results in its European context, and, second, a more detailed picture of one of the countries involved, Spain, including examples of implementation by participating teachers, their responses to the pedagogy, and student up-take in samples of their texts. The paper closes with reflections and future directions the project is taking in Spain, opening to new contexts for the R2L pedagogy.

For three decades, genre based literacy pedagogy has been describing the written genres that students are expected to read and write in school, and designing teaching/learning activities through which students can be guided to read and write these genres successfully. This paper positions this research within the model of language and pedagogy that informs it, and then describes a system of literacy teaching activities that have been designed in the genre based methodology Reading to Learn . The function of these designed activities is to provide access to the genres in which knowledge is written and read in schools and academia. Both written genres and teaching/learning activities are described in terms of their social functions and structuring. In addition, teaching/learning activities are described in more detail, at the level of classroom discourse, as careful design of teacher/learner interaction is a critical component of the Reading to Learn methodology.

European language policy focusing on the development of the languages of schooling is opening new paths to best fit the necessities of students, whether in bilingual or monolingual communities. Bilingual education is no longer an exclusive entity, but is increasingly becoming mainstreamed. In doing so, it can promote the consolidation of linguistic competence in all languages in the curriculum. Thus, in parallel with proposals whose aim is primarily to improve the use of disciplinary literacies in the foreign language used as the vehicle of instruction, there are programmes which seek to strengthen the foreign language, the mother tongue, and perhaps a second foreign language, through the use of subject-specific literacies (pluriliteracies) in all the languages. An example of this strategy can be found in some regions of Spain, with the decision to promote the academic language in distinct areas and in different languages through implementation of whole-school language projects. This article describes the forces and mechanisms underlying the proposal, its characteristics and practical application, and ultimately addresses the relevance of the scheme as a valuable tool to surpass the traditional objectives of bilingual education programmes and to enhance the attainment of pluriliteracies in the curriculum.

In this article, a prototype of a whole school curriculum will be introduced which could be a framework for including more foreign languages than usual and for combining systematically foreign language instruction with content teaching, thereby enhancing the opportunities for school development. It has been tested as a political instrument for school development; examples of good practice will be given. In this article, it will be shown what this whole school language curriculum looks like, how it can be implemented and which research results were obtained.

This project investigates early learning and teaching of English in Danish primary schools. Encouraged by recent calls for research to apply a complex multifactor research design to investigate early foreign language (FL) learning (Edelenbos & Kubanek 2009; Lindgren & Muñoz 2013), the project investigates the impact of starting age of learning, i.e., the age factor, and a range of contextual factors (the quantity and quality of exposure to English inside and outside the classroom) and socio-affective factors (children’s motivation and attitudes towards learning, and parents’ education, (perceived) proficiency in the FL, their attitudes towards language learning, and their use of the foreign language professionally) in children’s rate of L2 learning and short-term English language proficiency.