Overview of Curricular Demands of Disciplinary Literacies: An Exploratory Survey

Can students truly understand complex concepts accurately if they are not equipped with the language needed to precisely organize those concepts, cognitively? If students cannot use language well to express their understanding of a given topic precisely, can we be sure that they have indeed learnt well? Can we allow young adolescents to complete compulsory education and leave school with limited ability to use language to express complex ideas in ways which are appropriate for their age and suitable for the profession they wish to pursue? COST Action 21114 “CLILNetLE: CLIL Network for Languages in Education” recognizes that the explicit teaching of academic language and discipline-specific discourse is crucial for successful learning. Indeed, as we leave compulsory education and move forward professionally, many of us will often need to deal with “topics” which belong to school subjects which may not be an intricate part of our professional livelihood. Thus, school leavers need to be multi-literate i.e. sufficiently literate in all school subjects to make informed decisions, or at least know the limitations of their knowledge and thus seek out additional information before making decisions. While this objective of “informed citizenship” is elegant but elusive, objectives such as “raising teachers’ awareness to the importance of language in education” and “delineating the type of language teachers want their students to master”, are concrete and executable ways to achieve literacy. This Report represents Deliverable 7 (D7) of COST Action 21114 and is an exploratory survey which makes a first step in the abovementioned, more concrete direction. The explicit objective of this Deliverable is to “overview curricular demands regarding bi/multilingual disciplinary literacies in CLIL across educational levels, for Key Subjects” (Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), p. 18), surveying “at least three ITC countries and three Non-ITC countries” (MoU, p. 20). The results reported here reflect the work of 33 Researchers from 19 Universities, a teacher-training institution and a high school, located in six ITC Countries and five non-ITC Countries (Table 1). Together, these researchers performed two parallel but complementary TASKS to survey and overview curricular demands of disciplinary literacies from two angles: • In TASK-1, researchers used a well-defined codebook and survey template to pore through and survey their respective National or Regional Curricular Documents for instances of explicit mention of the need for students to show their understandings through productive displays of disciplinary literacy/ies. • In TASK-2, researchers used a well-defined protocol to elicit from teachers themselves, written texts which they feel demonstrate the quality of disciplinary discourse which they expect from their students (spoken text in the case of primary-level students). Such teacher-generated samples serve as a proxy for “curricular demands of disciplinary literacies”. These texts, which reveal teachers’ expectations, were subsequently analysed using a coding protocol which allowed researchers to delineate the language features teachers expect from students when displaying learning. Results of this two-part exploratory survey indicate that official curricular documents often list very explicit cognitive learning objectives by way of “understand, appreciate, know, etc.” but rarely make explicit mention of the need to prompt students for productive demonstrations of knowledge. For example, by simply adding a few words, information stored within the head of learners through verbs such as “understand, know, appreciate” can be drawn out through verbs which call for productive displays of knowledge such as “explain how they have understood that…; write an essay to show their appreciation of…; list information which shows that they know…” A concrete next step might be to revisit or “rehaul” (in the words of the AT Team) official curricular documents so to make more explicit the quality of language students should use when displaying their learning, knowledge and age-appropriate cognitive maturity. This is complemented by the corpus of texts collected through TASK-2 whereby teachers themselves made explicit the discourse features they would like to see in their students’ written texts, i.e. students’ productive discourse. This information can now be used to design instructional tasks and materials to help both content and language teachers build their students’ academic and discipline-specific language skills without requiring content teachers to become language teachers or language teachers to start teaching content.