ACADEMIC LANGUAGE FUNCTIONS IN CLIL DISCOURSE: A CLASSROOM BASED RESEARCH

David Marsh (1994) refers to content and language integrated learning (CLIL) as “situations where subjects, or parts of subjects, are taught through a foreign language with dual-focused aims, namely the learning of content, and the simultaneous learning of a foreign language”. Nowadays, CLIL is implemented in a wide variety of educational contexts all over Europe, thus becoming the approach that best provides opportunities for effective second language learning (Lyster 2007). In this new CLIL scenario Italy represents a vanguard. The Reform of the Italian secondary school system (2010) made the implementation of CLIL teaching in at least one foreign language compulsory from the third year of upper secondary language schools and in the last year of schooling. Given its potential for the improvement of learners’ language competences, CLIL discourse is viewed as an interesting area of investigation. It is from these premises that this classroom-based research aims to investigate the extent to which the teaching of scientific school subjects through English can foster the use of the micro academic language function (ALF) of hypothesising as a tool for the process of constructing meaning. The study, which is the first attempt to analyse teacher discourse in the recent Italian context, reports on data collected in 45 lessons in 5 different scientific subjects: Biology, Chemistry, Earth Science, Mathematics, and Physics, taught in three upper-secondary language schools in Milan from February 2015 to January 2016. The analysis aims to investigate in particular how much hypothesising there is in scientific-subject CLIL lessons, how the function of hypothesising occurs and how it is linguistically realized across the lessons. Data have been analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively and compared among the subjects and the CLIL teachers, when possible. Insights from this study aim to contribute to highlighting some issues related to the incidence of hypotheses and their use across different scientific-subject CLIL lessons. In particular, the findings could encourage the CLIL teachers to strengthen their language awareness and efficacy in the second language acquisition process in CLIL lessons, at least with regards to the verbalization of hypotheses. In addition, since findings have to do with the first generation of officially trained CLIL teachers in Italy, this study might well be taken into account by academics and researchers involved in designing language and methodology training for CLIL teachers where there is also an interest in directing the trainee’s attention to the use of ALFs in the CLIL context.