An analysis of the use of cognitive discourse functions in English-medium history teaching at university
Introduction
English-medium instruction (EMI) is becoming a key concern in many universities around the world because it is perceived as an unavoidable part of higher education institutions' internationalization process, to the extent that is has become “an almost taken-for-granted quality” (Saarinen & Nikula, 2013: 146). However, many teachers embark on EMI without having had any previous training and are left on their own to face the different challenges posed by teaching in a foreign language. O'Dowd (2018) carried out a survey to which 70 European universities from 11 countries responded and observed that 30% of them provided no training courses, and half failed to offer courses on the integration of content and language (if offered, courses were exclusively focused on the development of communicative skills). In most institutions language concerns are not contemplated in language policies and this lack of concern at the meso level (the institution's language policy) trickles down to the micro level (the EMI classroom). In fact, other studies from beyond the European context have also consistently revealed that EMI teachers, irrespective of their specialization, consider that language teaching falls outside their remit and that they cannot be held responsible for language teaching (Doiz, Lasagabaster, & Pavón, 2019; Byun et al., 2011; Jiang, Zhang, & May, 2019; Lasagabaster, 2018; Sert, 2008).
However, if students are to succeed in their EMI courses, they need to become familiar with the specialized language and norms that pertain to each disciplinary field, so that they are enabled to produce written and spoken products that comply with the disciplinary culture concerned (Dafouz & Smit, 2020). The need to develop students' disciplinary discourse knowledge becomes therefore indispensable and EMI teachers should support their students’ ability to build sequences of discourse which flow and have cohesion (Llinares, Morton, & Whittaker, 2012). Each discipline primes discourse functions in a different manner. In the case of history, meaning is produced through particular language functions, such as causality, comparison and justification, and the language employed is characterized by some specific features, such as nominalizations, cause–effect relations, and terms glossed with appositive phrases, among others (Lorenzo, Granados, & Ávila, 2019).
The interaction between teachers and learners thus plays a key role in the construction of knowledge, because classroom discourse becomes “a semiotic mediator of knowledge construction with respect to curriculum content” (Haneda & Wells, 2008: 114). Haneda and Wells (2008) state, by engaging students with a topic in a foreign language, EMI teachers can help to scaffold students’ transition from everyday to scientific language. If students are to develop their discursive competence, they need to be offered many examples of the use of discourse functions and ample opportunities to practice them. Although it has to be acknowledged that university history students have already gone through some of the stages of this transition, the literature on scaffolding disciplinary language has mainly been conducted at the pre-university level (Dalton-Puffer & Bauer-Marschallinger, 2019; Llinares et al., 2012; Lorenzo et al., 2019; Whittaker, Llinares, & McCabe, 2011) and much less attention has been paid to higher education.
A distinction between the oral and the written mode needs to be made, as they mediate discourse functions and differences may be found between the two modes (Ädel, 2010), since the immediacy of the oral mode fosters greater involvement and the use of more engagement features to deliver classroom content (Hyland, 2005). As the latter author points out, discourse functions are context-dependent and are closely related to the norms and expectations of those who use them in specific settings, which leads us to the concept of genre. Paraphrasing Hyland (2005), we could define genre as a term for grouping oral texts together that represents how speakers use language to respond to recurring situations, such as those found in a specific discipline (history in our case) when lecturing. Since lectures usually represent “the prototypical genre of information transfer” (Hyland, 2005: 10) at the university level, our analysis is focused on EMI lectures characterized by a teacher-fronted teaching style, that is, the academic lecture genre.
With this in mind, in this paper we focus on teachers' use of discourse functions as transmitters and builders of content knowledge, from which students can model the discursive patterns of their field of specialization. The analysis of the teachers’ discourse is couched in the construct of Cognitive Discourse Function (CDF) (Dalton-Puffer, 2016) and conducted in the light of the competences that students are expected to acquire by the end of their studies. Following Morton (2020) the ultimate goal of the paper is to illustrate how content, literacy and language are connected.
Section snippets
Cognitive discourse functions
Dalton-Puffer (2016: 29) defines CDFs as “verbal routines that have arisen in answer to recurring demands while dealing with curricular content, knowledge and abstract thought.” According to her, the study of CDFs will allow researchers to establish the connections between subject-specific learning goals and how they are approached in EMI classes. If EMI teachers understand how such connections are established, they can not only decide what content they are going to teach, but also how they are
A review of studies based on the CDF construct in EMI settings
As mentioned in the introduction, the distinction between the oral and written modes should be borne in mind, as there are differences in CDF realization, depending on the genre. Our study is focused on the academic lecture genre, which is why it represents an extension of previous studies (Breeze & Dafouz, 2017) at the university level which revolve around the written mode, as we will see below.
The validity of the CDF construct was confirmed in a series of studies which took place in the
The study
With the previous literature review in mind, in this paper we address the following research question: Which CDFs are used by lecturers in support of three history degree competences, outlined in 4.1? The present is a convenience sample as we chose history rather than another discipline because we had the opportunity to carry out this study in collaboration with our history colleagues, who were willing to participate.
The main innovative feature of this study lies in the fact that it was carried
Results
In this section we discuss each of the three competences individually and the CDF types that the teachers used in their discourse to support them. No descriptive statistical analysis of the CDF types was conducted, but the examination of the data provided the two authors of this paper with an impressionistic overview of which types were used the most or the least.
Conclusions
This study has shown that the theoretical CDF construct is a useful tool for understanding the teachers' transmission of knowledge, while unveiling its potential to facilitate the acquisition of the competences specified for a history degree at the UBC. However, our data has also revealed that the characterizations of some CDFs need to be slightly adapted to capture the particularities of the discipline. Firstly, the CDF EVALUATE, i.e. the provision of the speaker's viewpoint on a matter or
Funding
This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness [grant number FFI2016-79377-P]; and the Department of Education, University and Research of the Basque Government [grant number IT904-16].
Declaration of competing interest
None.
Acknowledgements
We authors would like to thank the teachers involved for their invaluable collaboration and willingness to participate in this study.
Aintzane Doiz is Associate Professor at the Department of English and German Studies and Translation and Interpretation, University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, Spain. She has published on EMI (English-Medium Instruction), CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), and motivation. She has published widely in international journals, books and edited books.
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Aintzane Doiz is Associate Professor at the Department of English and German Studies and Translation and Interpretation, University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, Spain. She has published on EMI (English-Medium Instruction), CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), and motivation. She has published widely in international journals, books and edited books.
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