Developing language awareness in subject classes

In 1979, Jim Cummins defined two types of language to illustrate the difference: Basic interpersonal communication skills, BICS, and Cognitive academic language proficiency, CALP. BICS refer to the language used in familiar, here-and-now situations.  BICS often develop rapidly in a second language because it is used when interacting with friends, peers etc. CALP, on the other hand, is the language students meet in a subject lesson at school. It is more abstract, often in a written form and it is context-impoverished (Leung 2003). Recently, these two registers are rather perceived as different uses of language in a continuum (e.g. Snow & Uccelli 2009). The current trend seems to be using general terms academic language as opposed to ordinary language (Scarcella 2003), social or conversational language (see e.g. Fitts & Bowers 2013).

Mary Schleppegrell (2006) underlines that in school students are expected to display knowledge, organise information and express knowledge and views in an authoritative voice. Schleppegrell also stresses that dense information, abstractions, technicalities, multiple semiotic systems, conventional text structures are factors which characterise the language of schooling. When teachers are not aware of the language challenges encountered in subjects like science, history, mathematics etc., learning may become very problematic for some students.

Closely connected to the language of schooling is a method, which integrates content and language learning (CLIL). CLIL is often used in connection to English, for instance teaching mathematics to Finnish students (in Finland) in English or French or another foreign language. The idea is that subject teaching and language teaching go hand in hand, and that students get the best of both, building knowledge at the same time as learning a language. In the Canadian immersion programs, English native speakers are taught most subjects in French. In the European context, CLIL is often a matter of teaching a subject or parts of a subject in a foreign language for a limited period.

In the European context, CLIL is a less dramatic and more flexible approach to language immersion. The interest for CLIL is found on two completely different levels in Europe (Dalton-Puffer, 2009). At the school level, individual schools/teachers, in consultancy with students and parents, decide on CLIL teaching in specific subjects (or parts of subjects). On the other hand, different EU agencies have produced political documents from the early 1990, which have made it clear that CLIL is seen as an important tool to make more European citizens speak more languages (Marsh, 2002; Commission of the European communities, 2003). In Europe, there are few CLIL initiatives at regional or national levels.

Beacco (2010), Vollmer (2010), Pieper (2011) and Linneweber-Lammerskitten (2012) discuss the language students need to cope with to meet academic challenges at the end of compulsory education, at the age of 15-16¹. The particular linguistic and semiotic competences students ought to have at this point include strategic competence, discourse competence and formal (linguistic) competence. The strategic competence implies that students have the ability to plan, execute, evaluate and correct the linguistic activities they are involved in school. Having discourse competence means being able to understand and cope with the different types of discourse that students encounter in school subjects. Textbooks, lectures, reports, articles, news items and documentaries are examples of types of discourse students may be confronted with in different school subjects. Formal competence is, according to the same researchers, both the ability to formulate sentences and texts with correct spelling, morphology and syntax as well as using different discourse functions, such as to argue, classify, compare, explain, define, illustrate etc. All these functions, and more, are typical functions used in most school subjects.

¹In most European countries, compulsory education is the period from when the students are 5 – 6 until they are 15 – 16 years old (European Commission/Eurydice, 2015).

In many countries, basic skills in all subjects are integrated in competence aims and curriculum goals. Competence aims in subjects like history, physics and others indicate language goals as well as knowledge goals. For example, according to the Norwegian science curriculum for 10^th grade students they should be able to:

• formulate testable hypotheses, plan and conduct investigations and discuss observations and results in a report;
• explain how electrical energy can be produced from renewable and non-renewable energy sources and discuss the environmental impacts that accompany different ways of producing energy.

Each subject teacher is responsible for opening up his or her subject to students in a way that gives them an opportunity to build knowledge and make sense of the different topics addressed in the subject. This means focusing on knowledge and language. “The language dimension in teaching and learning subject-matter is of equal importance as in language as subject itself” (Beacco et al., 2015).