Designing materials for building subject-specific literacies: Secondary-level chemistry

The product of evolution, our brain is optimized for species survival in the jungle, not for learning post-primary-level science concepts, even when taught in L1, let alone a foreign language. Additionally, in many contexts worldwide, secondary-level CLIL science teachers lack the expertise to provide language instruction regarding the CLIL foreign language (FL) and FL teachers cannot teach secondary-level science. However, what might unite subject experts and their FL colleagues is “functional productive (subject-specific) literacy”, the ability to structure (foreign) language into discourse which reflects age-appropriate thinking, and, in the case of science instruction, discipline-specific understandings. This contribution suggests refocusing the “L=Language” in the CLIL-acronym onto “L=Literacy” and facilitate this change through literacy-focusing CLIL-tasks designed through the lens of cognitive neuroscience. To illustrate how this proposal might look in practice, we provide step-by-step analyses of how instructional materials originally intended for teaching chemistry within monolingual Anglophone contexts, were “CLIL-adapted” for Italian secondary-level students. Learning outcomes from an initial version, developed in 2011, demonstrate that CLIL-tasks focused on building chemistry literacy improved students’ English-FL skills. These CLIL materials were subsequently revised to operationalize Cognitive Discourse Functions: literacy-focusing tasks were designed to explicitly teach students how to structure complex subject-specific texts. Neither version required secondary-level FL teachers to “teach science” nor their science colleagues to “teach language”.