ABSTRACT

Embedded in a Systemic Functional understanding of education as an initiation into knowledge structures and specific activities, both of which are fundamentally mediated by language, this paper addresses one of the critical concerns around CLIL: a possible mismatch between students’ cognitive level and their L2 proficiency. The focus is on acts of classifying, comparing and contrasting facts, objects, phenomena, abstract ideas and concepts. Such cognitive and verbal actions are key in the construction of specialist knowledge, having been bundled in an umbrella cognitive discourse function (CDF) categorize. To operationalize this CDF, we develop a conceptual map through an exploratory, data-driven analysis of an oral learner corpus in L2 English and L1 Spanish on science and history topics collected in primary bilingual schools in Madrid. We also use SFL tools to examine lexico-grammatical choices which students employ to realize categorize across the two subjects and languages. The analysis shows that students encounter a range of difficulties, both conceptual and linguistic, when forming complete and appropriate categorizations in both languages. The results obtained across subjects reveal clear subject-specific tendencies in how categorizing is carried out: comparing seems to be a defining figure of thought in history while classifications were predominant in science.

摘要

本文嵌入了对教育的系统功能理解，作为知识结构和特定活动的开始，这两者从根本上都是由语言调节的，本文解决了围绕 CLIL 的关键问题之一：学生的认知水平与其 L2 熟练程度之间可能存在的不匹配. 重点是对事实、对象、现象、抽象思想和概念进行分类、比较和对比的行为。这种认知和言语行为是专业知识构建的关键，已被捆绑在一个伞状认知话语功能 (CDF)分类中. 为了实施该 CDF，我们通过对马德里小学双语学校收集的关于科学和历史主题的 L2 英语和 L1 西班牙语口语学习者语料库进行探索性、数据驱动的分析来开发概念图。我们还使用 SFL 工具来检查学生用来实现跨两个学科和语言的分类的词汇语法选择。分析表明，学生在用两种语言形成完整和适当的分类时会遇到一系列困难，包括概念上的和语言上的。跨学科获得的结果揭示了在如何进行分类方面明确的特定学科倾向：比较似乎是历史上思想的决定性形象，而分类在科学中占主导地位。