Prof. Angel Lin
Faculty of Education
The University of Hong Kong
Email: angellin@hku.hk
Languaging and the Triadic Dialogue in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) classrooms
Abstract
Language is a primary semiotic in construing the world (i.e., constructing knowledge about the world), and the world (or content) is grasped mainly through language (Halliday, 2004). Drawing on Halliday (1975, 1993) and Painter (1999)’s work, Rose and Martin propose that successful learning depends on “guidance through interaction in the context of shared experience” (2012: 58), and this guidance takes place through the unfolding dialogue. In the same vein, Swain and Lapkin (2013) argue, from sociocultural perspectives, that languaging in collaborative dialogue is essential for content learning.
However, in contexts where learning is often driven by examination culture, such as in many of Hong Kong’s Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) classrooms (Lin, 2007), what students are required to do often involves little more than reciting or reproducing subject-specific wordings in worksheets or co-constructing a corpus of (teacher-prepared / textbook-based) “certified true beliefs” about a certain academic topic (Heap, 1985; Lin, 2007). In such lessons little real languaging takes place, and teacher-student interaction is often accomplished through employing the Initiation-Response-Evaluation (IRE) triadic exchange (Sinclair and Coulthard, 1975; Mehan, 1979; Nassaji and Wells, 2000).
In this paper, we report a fine-grained analysis of lesson excerpts selected from 2 senior secondary biology teachers from a corpus of over 50 CLIL science lessons observed in Hong Kong secondary schools between 2009 and 2013. Our purpose in analyzing the different kinds of classroom discourse is to uncover what seems to be co-accomplished by teachers and students and, on this basis, to provide support for CLIL teachers.
About the Speaker:
Angel Lin is Professor of English Language and Literacy Education at the Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong. She is well-respected for her interdisciplinary research in classroom discourse analysis, bilingual education, academic literacies, language across the curriculum (LAC) and content and language integrated learning (CLIL). Her forthcoming book, Language Across the Curriculum: Theory and Practice will be published in 2016.