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International Journal of Bilingual

Education and Bilingualism
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Language use and language learning in

CLIL classrooms
a
Álvaro Acosta Corte
a
University of Hong Kong, China

Version of record first published: 20 Mar 2012

To cite this article: Álvaro Acosta Corte (2012): Language use and language learning
in CLIL classrooms, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism,
DOI:10.1080/13670050.2012.666117

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 International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism
2012, 1
3, iFirst article

BOOK REVIEW

Language use and language learning in CLIL classrooms, edited by Christiane

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Dalton-Puffer, Tarja Nikula and Ute Smit, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, John Benjamins,

2010, 295 pp., £95.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-90-272-0523-0

Over the last decade, Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) has
emerged as a revolution in the educational panorama and is rapidly transforming
language teaching and learning in many European countries. CLIL is an innovative
movement that is currently being adopted in primary, secondary and tertiary
institutions in order to foster language learning while students are taught subject
matter content. CLIL theorises that both content and language learning can co-
occur. This idea is partially based on successful previous experiences in Canada and
the USA. However, CLIL arises as a European construct, the European refined
version of immersion and bilingual programmes in these countries. In addition,
CLIL also derives from progressivist ideas in educational philosophy, which
constitute the source of most of the current educational practices. The emphasis
on the process rather than on the product, the learning by doing approach and the
quest for relevant and meaningful activities with an apparent non-linguistic goal and
a problem-solving character are the product of this educational philosophy and the
pillars of successors of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) such as the Task-
Based Approach and the Action-Oriented Approach the Council of Europe
advocates in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.
CLIL is clearly a step forward that feeds from the aforementioned approaches and
previous experiences.
Language Use and Language Learning in CLIL Classrooms emerges from the need
for more research whose primary concern is language use rather than the content
learning outcomes or the improvements
or not
in students’ language performance
and communicative competence in CLIL classrooms. The contributions to this
volume all approach the topic from different perspectives and settings, but it seems
quite clear that they all emanate from the fields of Discourse Analysis and Discourse
Pragmatics. Hallidayan approaches such as Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL)
are also at the core of much of the research contained in the book.
The volume is divided into three parts. The first is devoted to general and
theoretical issues in CLIL, and it provides readers with an overview on how CLIL
might be able to maximise the communicative potentialities of the language
classroom and achieve the objectives that CLT always intended but never attained.
Lorenzo and Moore’s study entitled ‘On the natural emergence of language
structures in CLIL: Towards a theory of European bilingualism’ suggests that
students’ language skills improve as a result of the naturalistic, incidental learning
favoured by the massive exposure to authentic and meaningful input CLIL provides.
This is explained by means of an engaging psycholinguistic discussion relating their

ISSN 1367-0050 print/ISSN 1747-7522 online

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 2 Book review

findings to the concepts of restructuring, transfer and interlanguage and calling into
question the native-speaker standards at which most of the English as a foreign
language teaching has aimed to date, in the light of re-conceptualisations of English
as an International Language or Lingua Franca and a so-called primacy of content
in CLIL. Maillat’s chapter, ‘The pragmatics of L2 in CLIL’, explores how the study
of Pragmatics of SLA can contribute to language teaching in CLIL environments,
suggesting a cognitive model which focuses on the so-called mask effect and how this
could foster CLIL students’ output.
The second part of the volume, which is also the most extensive one, looks into
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CLIL practice at the secondary level and provides interested readers with research on
a wide array of geographical backgrounds and students’ ages. Editors have further
divided this section according to language modes in such a way that the first three
chapters deal with spoken production, the last three papers are concerned with
written production and the middle chapter deals with both of them. Hüttner and
Rieder-Bünemann’s study focuses on a comparison between German-speaking
students of English who have followed CLIL-type classes against those who have
followed standard curricula. In their chapter ‘A cross-sectional analysis of oral
narratives by children with CLIL and non-CLIL instruction’, the authors compare
both the oral communicative competence in English and German and the
performance of CLIL students and those who follow the traditional strand. They
conclude that CLIL instruction has proved beneficial, especially when it comes to the
acquisition of complex morpho-syntactic elements and narrative devices. Tom
Morton’s chapter is devoted to the suitability of a genre-based approach across
subject areas taught via a CLIL methodology. After conducting a study on the
reconstruction of historical events in the classroom and drawing from the Hallidayan
SFL, he argues for a more language-driven curriculum based on the notion of
‘genre’. Nikula’s ‘Effects of CLIL on a teacher’s classroom language use’ conducts a
discourse-pragmatic analysis of teacher talk. It is presented in the form of a case
study in which a teacher’s discourse is analysed when teaching both in English (the
CLIL language) and in Finnish (his and his students’ mother tongue). The findings
reveal that the teacher’s use of language when teaching in English is more prone to
negotiation of meaning and interaction with students, whilst his discourse in classes
conducted in Finnish tends to a more significant amount of unidirectional one-way
communication, adopting a more informative role. Llinares and Whittaker’s chapter
‘Writing and speaking in the history class presents a comparative analysis of CLIL
and first language context’ provides another discourse analysis conducted from the
point of view of SFL. The textual function is left behind in order to focus on the
ideational and interpersonal functions. An analysis of processes, participants,
circumstances and modality is carried out in order to paint a portrait of the
differences in the written and oral discourses of CLIL students and students who are
learning the subject matter in their mother tongue, in this case Spanish. Järvinen’s
study is entitled ‘Language as a meaning making resource in learning and teaching
content. It analyses historical writing in content and language integrated learning’
now, focusing on the written mode only. Again within a SFL framework, it provides
a thoughtful insight on how students use language in order to build historical
meaning in their essays. In order to do that, she analyses some features of
grammatical metaphor in terms of syntactic intricacy and thematic organisation,
such as nominalisation or lexical density. Similarly to what Morton suggests,
Järvinen’s conclusions reflect the need for a genre-based CLIL teaching that
 International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 3

integrates explicit focus-on-form attention to certain language patterns such as

grammatical metaphor. The last two articles in Part Two compare CLIL and English
as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners, showing a better performance in writing by
the former when compared to the latter. On the one hand, Jexenflicker and Dalton-
Puffer’s contribution, ‘The CLIL differential. Comparing the writing of CLIL and
non-CLIL students in higher colleges of technology’, reveals that CLIL students
stand ahead of their mainstream peers, especially at the morphosyntactic, lexical and
orthographical levels. Nevertheless, at the level of discourse and textual organisation,
the performance of both CLIL and traditional EFL students is still quite poor. On
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the other hand, Ruiz de Zarobe’s chapter provides an encouraging account where
CLIL students clearly outperform EFL learners, giving evidence of the positive
effects CLIL input exposure has on learners’ writing.
Part three contains three further chapters that focus on the integration of
language and content at the tertiary level, where research is still scarce. Also drawing
on SFL, Dafouz Milne and Núñez Perucha’s contribution, entitled ‘Metadiscursive
devices in university lectures. A contrastive analysis of L1 and L2 teacher
performance’, assesses teacher talk again by conducting a contrastive discourse
analysis of several lectures given by the same lecturers in both English and Spanish
pointing out the metadiscursive devices used when teaching. Hellekjær’s chapter,
‘Language matters. Assessing lecture comprehension in Norwegian English-medium
higher education’, focuses on the development of receptive skills by CLIL students at
university level, comparing comprehension of lectures in English (the CLIL
language) and Norwegian (the students’ L1). The author underlines the language
difficulties and weaknesses higher education Norwegian students face when
attending lectures in the foreign language. The last contribution is Smit’s chapter
entitled ‘CLIL in an English as a lingua franca classroom. On explaining terms and
expressions interactively’. It provides an interesting account based on a pragmatic-
discourse analysis of how input is made comprehensible in lectures where English is
used as the lingua franca and argues in favour of ‘interactive explaining’, a term
coined by the author, which attempts to provide a framework that allows access to
the analysis of discursive learning processes.
All in all, this is a volume that provides extensive cutting-edge research on how
language is used within CLIL classrooms by both students and teachers. It offers a
broad picture across educational levels and across countries. It is especially useful for
practitioners and researchers interested in how pragmatic and discourse analyses can
inform pedagogical practices when it comes to integrating language and content in
order to foster both students’ communicative competence and subject-matter content
learning.

Álvaro Acosta Corte

University of Hong Kong, China
[email protected]
# 2012, Álvaro Acosta Corte
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2012.666117