“How Do the Apples Reproduce (Themselves)?” How Teacher Trainees Negotiate Language, Content, and Membership in a CLIL Science Education Classroom at a Multilingual University

Abstract

This article discusses findings from ongoing research into plurilingual group work interaction in a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) teacher training classroom at a university in Catalonia, Spain. We explore how participants make use of available verbal and non-verbal resources—for example, their multilingual verbal repertoires, posture, gesture, gaze—to collaboratively accomplish various activities and, specifically, to problematize linguistic and subject knowledge, to construct science teacher discourse, and to dynamically and simultaneously negotiate membership in immediate and “imagined” communities. Although the shift in European higher education toward teaching nonlanguage subjects through the medium of a foreign language would appear to favor monolingual practices and be detrimental to local languages, our data reveal that participants' plurilingual repertoires can act as a resource in classroom interaction, creating a favorable framework for performing a range of activities that would seem to enrich the collective learning process.