​Building disciplinary knowledge in CLIL: Cognitive discourse functions and semantic waves

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ABSTRACT

CLIL teachers are asked to prepare students to engage critically with global challenges. But critical engagement rests on knowledge: students can only evaluate an argument or a proposed solution if they can work with the ideas of the subjects involved, both at the level of theory and through concrete examples. This talk proposes two tools that help teachers build that knowledge: cognitive discourse functions (CDFs), such as defining, explaining and evaluating, and semantic waves, which describe how teaching and learning move between concrete and abstract meanings. Both tools are global, in that they travel across countries, educational cultures and subjects. Yet used together, they are local in what they reveal: the distinctive ways knowledge is built in each subject and classroom, and how it can be strengthened. Drawing on a corpus of over 8,000 texts written by secondary CLIL students in 20 schools across Spain, covering the whole curriculum and including longitudinal data from Years 7 to 10, I show how students’ production of CDFs varies across subjects, year groups and tasks. Prompts were designed with teachers, linking research and school practice. I present a framework for unit planning that links subject knowledge and tasks to CDFs, their linguistic features and semantic waves. The framework supports content and language integration in instruction and assessment, and offers teachers across departments a shared language for collaborative planning. In this way, global frameworks support local units of work in which critical thinking rests on solid knowledge building.​​

 

 

BIO NOTE​

Tom Morton is profesor honorario in the Department of English Philology at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), where he teaches on the MA in Applied Linguistics and belongs to the UAM-CLIL research group. He is also a member of the Language and Literacy in Education Network (LLEN). His recent work, with UAM-CLIL colleagues and the CLILNetLE COST Action (2022–2026), focuses on disciplinary literacy in CLIL: how students learn to use language to build and express subject knowledge, and how cognitive discourse functions such as explaining, defining and evaluating can help teachers make these demands visible in the classroom. His wider research examines classroom interaction and teacher knowledge and development in CLIL and English-medium instruction, drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics and Legitimation Code Theory. He co-authored The Roles of Language in CLIL (Cambridge University Press, 2012, with Ana Llinares and Rachel Whittaker) and co-edited Applied Linguistics Perspectives on CLIL (John Benjamins, 2017, with Ana Llinares). His work has recently appeared in Applied Linguistics, TESOL Quarterly, Language Awareness, Language and Education, System and Linguistics and Education.