Classroom interactional competence in content and language integrated learning

Abstract

This chapter problematizes the Classroom Interactional Competence (CIC) of learners and teachers working in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) contexts. Through Multimodal Conversation Analysis (CA), we consider how CIC is enacted in dialogues which focus on both subject content and English. Our analysis reveals that (a) teachers’ deployment of multimodal resources ensures comprehension and self-selection; (b) teachers’ questions and evaluative feedback may play a major role in guiding the students; (c) the scarcity of teacher elicitations aimed at more elaborated learner responses may limit the development of academic discourse; and (d) groupwork may become a privileged environment for students to deploy and develop L2 interactional resources.