Language and the Triadic Dialogue in the Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) classroom

Abstract

Language is a primary semiotic (meaning-making resource) in construing the world (i.e., constructing knowledge about the world), and the world (or content) is grasped mainly through language (Halliday, 2004). Drawing on Halliday (1975, 1993) and Painter (1999)’s work, Rose and Martin (2012) propose that successful learning depends on “guidance through interaction in the context of shared experience” (p. 58), and this guidance takes place through unfolding dialogue. In the same vein, Swain and Lapkin (2013) argue, from sociocultural perspectives, that languaging in collaborative dialogue is essential for content learning. However, in contexts where learning is driven by an exam culture, such as in Hong Kong’s Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) classrooms (Lin, 2007), what students are required to do often involves little more than reciting/reproducing subject-specific wordings in worksheets or test items or co-constructing a corpus of (teacher-prepared or textbook-based) “certified true beliefs” about a certain academic topic (Heap, 1985; Lin, 2007). In such “CLIL” lessons little real languaging takes place; instead, teacher-student interaction is pseudo-dialogic and is often accomplished through employing the Initiation-Response-Evaluation (IRE) triadic exchange (Sinclair and Coulthard, 1975; Mehan, 1979; Nassaji and Wells, 2000). In this paper, we report a fine-grained analysis of lesson excerpts from a corpus of over 80 CLIL science lessons observed in Hong Kong middle schools between 2009 and 2013. Our purpose in analyzing the different kinds of classroom discourse observed is to uncover what seems to be co-accomplished by teachers and students and, on this basis, to provide support for CLIL teachers.