Discourse in Content-and-Language-Integrated Learning

Making meaning and displaying knowledge in educational context is intricately linked with specific discourse patterns, which accounts for the research interest that classroom discourse has engendered. Children and teenagers learn to ‘do school’ by learning to speak and write, as well as to listen and read, within the parameters of the subjects they are studying. This chapter addresses the specific case of discourse in CLIL classrooms. CLIL adds a foreign language, mostly English, to this set-up, creating a, more or less openly, bilingual and biliterate context. I will outline research conducted at different phases of CLIL research and in diverse strands, focusing primarily on the conceptualisation of CLIL as a specific, integrated teaching approach, resulting in a focus of subject-specific language learning, with accompanying discourse patterns