A construct of cognitive discourse functions for conceptualising content-language integration in CLIL and multilingual education

Abstract

AbstractSchool-level learners who study curricular content in a language that is not their first require active support in their development of academic language, ideally in conjunction with working on said content. However, content teachers naturally orient towards the learning goals formulated for their respective subjects, while language teachers do not routinely consider them. This situation could be resolved if a zone of convergence between content and language pedagogies could be established. In this paper I argue that cognitive discourse functions (CDFs) constitute such a zone of convergence as the cognitive processes involving subject-specific facts, concepts and categories are verbalized in recurring and patterned ways during the event of co-creating knowledge in the classroom. While numerous publications make reference to such discourse functions, no coherent and theoretically explicit model of CDFs exists to date. The main purpose of this paper is, therefore, to introduce such a model that is theoretically explicit and conceptually anchored in both education and linguistics. Initial evidence for the empirical grounding of the construct is presented and suggestions are made for the further elaboration, consolidation and use of the CDF Construct introduced in this article.