Explaining Hooke’s Law: Definitional Practices in a CLIL Physics Classroom

Abstract

This article examines how a teacher in a Content-and-Language-Integrated-Learning (CLIL) program engages in various definitional practices during a plenary episode in a physics class taught in English in Finland. The episode focuses on explaining Hooke’s law, which involves defining its key concepts and their relations as instructable matters. Using multimodal conversation analysis, the article shows how the teacher accomplishes definitions and definition-related actions through talk and a range of embodied and material resources. The different configurations of resources are coordinated to elucidate the key concepts, to contextualize them in relation to the larger activity, and to situate them in the domain of physical laws. The teacher’s actions occasion recipient responses from students that contingently shape the evolving lesson. The findings contribute to understanding how the installation of knowledge about a physical law is accomplished as the teacher’s professional work in a CLIL setting. Thus, for CLIL science teacher education, the study indicates the indispensable need to attend to the artful coordination of multilingual and multimodal practices that teachers employ to define and contextualize physical phenomena.