Papers & Book chapters by Natalia Evnitskaya
C. Escobar Urmeneta & L. Arnau (Eds.), Los retos de la internacionalización de los grados universitarios en el contexto del Espacio Europeo de Educación Superior, 2018
This article provides a comprehensive overview of the key aspects of classroom interaction in L2 ... more This article provides a comprehensive overview of the key aspects of classroom interaction in L2 and CLIL contexts and its effects on students’ academic and language development in such educational settings. It also aims to raise awareness of the role of language and discourse in teaching content and language in CLIL classrooms. More specifically, it discusses how teachers can efficiently enact Classroom Interactional Competence (CIC) which is a range of interactional strategies adjusted to the classroom micro-context and which are essential for the correct development of the teaching-learning process. The article presents how teachers can use classroom interaction to guide students in better understanding of subject-specific content, foster the development of students’ communicative competence in a foreign language and the integrated learning of content and language as well as promote a more active students’ participation in content-rich contexts. Last but not the least, the article discusses the role of the teacher in providing emotional support in the classroom and creating a safe environment where students can develop a positive self-image through their interactions both with the teacher and the peers.
This chapter introduces multimodal Conversation Analysis (CA) as a research framework for CLIL cl... more This chapter introduces multimodal Conversation Analysis (CA) as a research framework for CLIL classroom interaction. We begin by presenting key methodological principles of CA and discussing how CA has recently broadened its analytical focus to examine how modalities such as gestures and texts are used as resources for interaction. Following this, we review recent (multimodal) CA work that has investigated teaching and learning practices in classrooms involving
second language users, such as in CLIL and immersion settings. To illustrate the described methodological orientation, we briefly analyse one video-recorded interaction and conclude by suggesting research areas related to CLIL classrooms that could benefit from a multimodal CA perspective.
Classroom Discourse, 2017
Drawing on recent conversation-analytic and socio-interactionist
research on students’ participat... more Drawing on recent conversation-analytic and socio-interactionist
research on students’ participation in L1 and L2 classroom interaction
in teacher-fronted activities, this paper makes a step further by
presenting an exploratory study of students’ displays of willingness to
participate (WTP) in classroom interaction and pedagogical activities
across two educational and classroom settings (L2 classroom group
work and CLIL classroom whole-class activity), both of which are
characterized by the absence of teachers’ next-speaker selection
practices. The study focuses on occasions where students self-select
to provide a sequentially relevant second pair-part within
the current activity and how it is oriented to by co-participants,
particularly when the expected action is not accomplished. Using a
multimodal conversation analytic approach, it shows that students’
WTP is indexed as a social, public demonstration of one’s interest to
engage in the ongoing activity through displays of attentiveness to
unfolding interaction and learning activities, emerging turn-taking
and speakership establishment, engaging in foci of attention and
participation frameworks, and taking on relevant participant roles.
These findings indicate that WTP is not an absolute and fixed concept
but is rather constituted by different aspects or levels of engagement
displayed by the participants in interaction on a moment-by-moment
basis.
The Language Learning Journal, 2014
This interpretive case study is framed within updated sociocultural conceptualisations of learnin... more This interpretive case study is framed within updated sociocultural conceptualisations of learning. More specifically, it draws on research on teacher-led classroom discussions, and aims to push this research area a step forward by exploring the conversational intricacies through which ‘dialogicity’ is accomplished in adaptive ways in one CLIL science classroom. Multimodal Conversation Analysis (CA) is performed in order to describe how Classroom Interactional Competence (CIC) is enacted by participants while developing a teacher-led discussion. The natural data come from a bilingual Catalan-Spanish secondary school classroom in Barcelona in which 16 twelve-year-old students learn biology in English as a third language. The analysis reveals that (a) the teacher’s systematic deployment of multimodal resources ensures comprehension and favours the emergence of learner-initiated turns; (b) as a result, a highly interwoven set of sequences of ‘mediation’ and ‘remediation’ occurs, jointly providing the students with opportunities for the appropriation of language and content, and (c) this abundance of resources contrasts with the scarcity of teacher moves aimed at eliciting more elaborated learner interventions. The study contributes to further understanding of the relationship between language, interaction and learning. It also shows how Multimodal CA may offer valuable tools for tracing the process of integrated learning.
Reviving Catalan at School: Challenges and Instructional Approaches, 2013
This paper is concerned with CLIL in English as a foreign language in secondary education in Cata... more This paper is concerned with CLIL in English as a foreign language in secondary education in Catalonia. Through the use of tools from Conversation Analysis and Sociocultural Discourse Analysis, the study contrasts the way two different CLIL teachers organise and manage respectively an academic conversation. Its goal is to empirically identify components of Classroom Interactional Competence (Walsh, 2006), present in the particular conditions of CLIL settings, by showing how the teachers’ instructional choices in the form of conversational adjustments afford students more or fewer opportunities for the integrated learning of language and content. The study concludes that the different sets of conversational strategies deployed by each teacher determine the quality of each conversation and its outcomes in terms of affordances for the integrated learning of content and language.
Bellaterra Journal of Teaching & Learning Language & Literature (BJTLLL), 2012
Professor Numa P. Markee is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Illinois at U... more Professor Numa P. Markee is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (United States) where he teaches courses in Conversation Analysis, Second Language Acquisition, Task Based Language Teaching and in Language Program Administration. His principal research interests are in the area of ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis applied to Second Language Acquisition (CA-for-SLA), Discursive Psychology, socially distributed cognition, classroom research, the uses of technology in applied linguistics research and ESL teaching, and the management of curricular innovation. In addition to numerous journal articles and book chapters on CA-for-SLA – the main topic of the present interview – Prof. Markee has also published a book Conversation Analysis (2000). The interview took place in January 2012 on the occasion of a series of conferences and workshops on Conversation Analysis carried out by Prof. Markee at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain) within the MA programme in Research on Language and Literature Education and as guest of the research group GREIP.
AICLE – CLIL – EMILE. Educació plurilingüe: Experiencias, research & polítiques, 2011
A secondary school science teacher’s reflections about science teaching and learning which emerge... more A secondary school science teacher’s reflections about science teaching and learning which emerged from the process of designing and piloting of teaching tasks and materials addressed to CLIL students in their first year of compulsory secondary education are presented. Task designing process was carried out in cooperation with two professors from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona specialised in Language Teaching and Science Teaching during the course 2008-2009. CLIL materials were piloted the same course in IES Montserrat (Barcelona) with a group of 30 students thanks to an Experimental Project of Foreign Languages funded by the Catalan Education Department.
In the process of designing, piloting and revision of CLIL tasks and materials there were identified strategies for science teaching that incorporated specific teaching procedures aimed at promoting comprehension and production of messages in a foreign language which are usual for the foreign language classroom. Discussions emerged from the CLIL materials’ designing process caused a broad revision of pedagogical approaches to science teaching which can be generalized to ordinary L1 classrooms. Eventually, it became clear that there is a need for coordination across disciplines among Science and English teachers in the design and implementation of CLIL teaching sequences.
Language and Education, 2011
This paper draws on Wenger's model of community of practice to present preliminary findings on ho... more This paper draws on Wenger's model of community of practice to present preliminary findings on how processes of negotiation of meaning and identity formation occur in knowledge construction, meaning-making and interaction in two secondary Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) science classrooms. It uses a multimodal conversation analysis methodology to provide detailed analyses of how teachers and students use talk-in-interaction and other semiotic resources to build and maintain their communities of practice. The data come from two CLIL classrooms in Spain in the same curricular area (biology) but which differ in geographical and sociolinguistic context (Barcelona and Madrid), and in terms of age, level of secondary education and pedagogical approach. The findings show the complex patterns of participation and reification as teachers and learners use different linguistic and other resources to make meaning. The paper argues that a combination of Wenger's meso-level practice model and micro-level multimodal conversation analysis is highly effective in elucidating how learning and identity formation are accomplished in CLIL classrooms. It also suggests that the efforts to understand classroom processes and language use in CLIL classrooms can be strengthened by forging links between CLIL research and the classroom discourse work across different disciplines.
Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada, 2008
The present article tackles interactions in a CLIL classroom from a conversational perspective. W... more The present article tackles interactions in a CLIL classroom from a conversational perspective. We pretend to examine a particular type of a relation, called a didactic contract, established between students while they carry out in-class communicative activities. In concrete, we are interested in observing two aspects of the contract that can take place between pupils who perform pair tasks. First, it is its characterization (appearing, establishing and functioning conditions). Second, it is its role in students' foreign language learning. The analyzed interactions were recorded in a public educational centre situated in Barcelona Metropolitan (Spain). The analysis shows the didactic contract between peers to be a flexible and temporary phenomenon that can favor target language learning.
Universitas Psychologica, 2008
In this article we carry out a conversational analysis of a talk among technological activists th... more In this article we carry out a conversational analysis of a talk among technological activists that took place in Barcelona city (Spain). Basing on a detailed transcription and a sequential revision of the interactions, a relevant identity category and its corresponding associated features are identified. Additionally, it is shown how the participants’ interventions help to form two ways of understanding hacktivism in Europe. In this way we hope to offer an interactional perspective on the collective identity and to show the potential of conversational analysis for social movements studies.
Books by Natalia Evnitskaya
El present volum és el resultat de la selecció de les millors comunicacions presentades en la pri... more El present volum és el resultat de la selecció de les millors comunicacions presentades en la primera Taula Rodona Internacional TRI-CLIL sobre Aprenentatge Integrat de Continguts i Llengües (AICLE). El congrés va aconseguir reunir professionals de la docència i de la recerca, tant de matèries escolars, llengües estrangeres i llengües considerades oficials o co-oficials a diferents territoris, que esdevenen llengües addicionals per a la població escolar migrada.
Los objetivos declarados por TRI-CLIL fueron los de:
· Presentar y discutir los adelantos en investigación y práctica docente sobre AICLE en lenguas segundas y extranjeras en aulas inclusivas. · Estimular el acercamiento y el diálogo entre profesionales de la enseñanza y de la investigación sobre aprendizaje de lenguas, y hacer visible la relevancia del diálogo y la retroalimentación continuada entre ambos grupos de profesionales.
· Promover la investigación aplicada en didáctica del plurilingüismo.
· Contribuir a la superación de los prejuicios lingüísticos que frenan el aprendizaje de lenguas segundas y extranjeras.
· Dar a conocer a la comunidad educativa la actividad pedagógica e investigadora sobre programas AICLE actualmente en vigor.
From the aforementioned objectives it becomes apparent that TRI-CLIL was somewhat different from other recent events on CLIL pedagogy, which have tended to focus exclusively on linguistic issues and to specialise either in teaching techniques or in research. On the contrary, TRI-CLIL's main concern was to bring together specialists with different professional backgrounds and academic profiles and get them to sit together and discuss in order to create new, shared understandings of the benefits and challenges that plurilingual education poses for us.
Papers in conference proceedings by Natalia Evnitskaya
Enseñanza de las Ciencias. Revista de investigación y experiencias didácticas, 2013
El estudio adopta la perspectiva sociocultural para examinar la interacción en un aula AICLE de c... more El estudio adopta la perspectiva sociocultural para examinar la interacción en un aula AICLE de ciencias. Se propone describir la manera como la profesora y los alumnos despliegan su Competencia Interactiva Escolar para elaborar las explicaciones de ciencia escolar: (a) los recursos interactivos que utilizan para señalar y abordar los obstáculos conceptuales y lingüísticos y (2) las oportunidades ofrecidas a los alumnos para desarrollar la lengua meta. Los datos provienen de un aula AICLE (Barcelona, España) donde los alumnos aprenden biología en inglés. El análisis de la conversación reveló que (a) la profesora adapta las explicaciones a las necesidades de los alumnos, (b) los participantes co-construyen las explicaciones y (c) las secuencias de “mediación” y “remediación” se entrelazan y brinden ocasiones para la apropiación integrada de la lengua y el contenido.
La investigación en didáctica de la lengua y la literatura: Situación actual y perspectivas de futuro, 2011
Este estudio preliminar 458 sobre la interacción profesora-alumnos compara dos conversaciones aca... more Este estudio preliminar 458 sobre la interacción profesora-alumnos compara dos conversaciones académicas ocasionadas durante la corrección de actividades true-false lideradas por dos profesoras en contextos de clases de ciencias AICLE. Mediante el análisis multimodal de la conversación se identificaron las estrategias conversacionales utilizadas por cada docente y se relacionaron con el nivel de implicación de los alumnos, el tratamiento de las dificultades lingüísticas y las oportunidades para la consolidación de su repertorio lingüístico-discursivo en L2. Los resultados del análisis permiten la formulación de consejos didácticos prácticos para el profesorado sobre la gestión de conversaciones académicas fundamentados en una base empírica. Palabras clave: AICLE, interacción profesora-clase, ajustes conversacionales, andamiaje, análisis multimodal. 457 Las autoras pertenecen al equipo colaborativo CLIL-SI Este estudio forma parte del proyecto EDU2010-15783 "Discurso académico en lengua extranjera: aprendizaje y evaluación de contenidos científicos en el aula multilingüe", financiado por el MICINN.
El valor de la diversidad [meta] lingüística. Proceedings of the VIII Congress on General Linguistics, 2008
Este estudio preliminar sobre la interacción profesora-alumnos compara dos conversaciones académi... more Este estudio preliminar sobre la interacción profesora-alumnos compara dos conversaciones académicas ocasionadas durante la corrección de actividades true-false lideradas por dos profesoras en contextos de clases de ciencias AICLE. Mediante el análisis multimodal de la conversación se identificaron las estrategias conversacionales utilizadas por cada docente y se relacionaron con el nivel de implicación de los alumnos, el tratamiento de las dificultades lingüísticas y las oportunidades para la consolidación de su repertorio lingüístico-discursivo en L2. Los resultados del análisis permiten la formulación de consejos didácticos prácticos para el profesorado sobre la gestión de conversaciones académicas fundamentados en una base empírica.
Edited conference proceedings by Natalia Evnitskaya
Paraules clau: AICLE en ensenyament superior, polítiques AICLE, perfil del professorat universita... more Paraules clau: AICLE en ensenyament superior, polítiques AICLE, perfil del professorat universitari, formació del professorat AICLE This study reports on a CLIL implementation process at a technical university that started four years ago. More specifically, it focuses on engineering lecturers' response to CLIL, namely their reluctance to receive CLIL methodological training, and suggests policies to cope with this reluctance.
Conference Presentations by Natalia Evnitskaya
MA & PhD Theses by Natalia Evnitskaya
TESEO, 2012
This PhD Dissertation is a case study which adopts an exploratory, interpretive and holistic qual... more This PhD Dissertation is a case study which adopts an exploratory, interpretive and holistic qualitative methodology in order to examine and portray the interactional process of the co-construction of academic dialogic explanations in CLIL settings. With this aim, naturally-occurring data, which come from a first year CLIL science classroom (Biology in English as L2) in a state-funded secondary school in Barcelona (Spain), are thoroughly analysed. The participants are a CLIL biology teacher and 16 twelve-year-old students.
This PhD dissertation adopts Multimodal CA-for-CLIL as its analytical methodology, which combines current sociocultural perspectives on teaching-and-learning with methods provided by Conversation Analysis and Multimodal Analysis. The detailed examination of teacher-student interactions is divided into three studies. Each study takes on different sociocultural constructs that contribute to understand the teacher and students' participation in the co-construction of dialogic explanations in the CLIL science classroom. The following constructs are employed: study 1: 'mediated action' and a 'community of practice' (CoP) approach to learning; study 2: 'opacity' and 'density'; study 3 'interactional competence' (IC) and 'participation'. In a transversal way, all three studies apply the constructs 'classroom interactional competence' (CIC) and 'interactional scaffolding'. Taken together, the three studies enable the analyst to provide a more comprehensible, precise and deeper picture of the phenomenon under consideration.
Study 1 reveals that the participants employ an array of multimodal resources (e.g., languages; prosody; pauses; gaze, gesture, head movement; material artefacts) as powerful interactional mediating tools to establish a mutual focus within teaching-and-learning activities, negotiate meanings, develop shared understandings and co-construct dialogic explanations. All this evidences the participants' joint orientation towards the students' progress in talking school-science in the L2 and their gradual transformation into competent practitioners of their science classroom CoP.
Study 2 focuses on the way the participants signal and cooperatively tackle obstacles caused by L2 opacity and content density. It is found that the process of constructing science explanations is dialogic, teacher-led and student-centred. In this process the sequences of mediation and remediation are highly interwoven. On the other hand, the processes of the de-contextualization and re-contextualization of the interactional focus on lexical items render an effective pedagogical strategy for L2 teaching in the CLIL classroom.
Study 3 demonstrates that the students, particularly those who remain silent, efficiently mobilize multimodal resources to accomplish their varied ways of participating in classroom interaction and teacher-led activities. Thus, they display their developing IC in the L2. This allows assuming that the gradual acquisition by 'silent' students of new ways of displaying their participation in social practices of the CLIL classroom may favour the development of their IC. Another contribution of this piece of work is the elaboration of a tentative analytical framework for the identification and characterization of different participation patterns displayed by students in CLIL classrooms.
Transversally, the three studies depict a teacher who skilfully deploys CIC and a range of interactional scaffolding strategies to guide the students in their cooperative enterprise of teaching-and-learning school-science in the L2. It is suggested that in this way the teacher has fostered interaction in the L2 in the observed classroom and created space and tools favourable for the co-construction and problematization of academic (content and language) knowledge and a more active participation of the students in this process.
As a whole, the dissertation demonstrates that the adopted analytical approach has rendered very well suited to capturing and describing intricacies and specificities of the interactional process of co-constructing academic dialogic explanations in one CLIL science classroom. It therefore provides further evidence that Multimodal CA-for-CLIL may enable researchers to better understand the way particular social practices can be jointly and interactionally accomplished by participants in CLIL classrooms.
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Papers & Book chapters by Natalia Evnitskaya
second language users, such as in CLIL and immersion settings. To illustrate the described methodological orientation, we briefly analyse one video-recorded interaction and conclude by suggesting research areas related to CLIL classrooms that could benefit from a multimodal CA perspective.
research on students’ participation in L1 and L2 classroom interaction
in teacher-fronted activities, this paper makes a step further by
presenting an exploratory study of students’ displays of willingness to
participate (WTP) in classroom interaction and pedagogical activities
across two educational and classroom settings (L2 classroom group
work and CLIL classroom whole-class activity), both of which are
characterized by the absence of teachers’ next-speaker selection
practices. The study focuses on occasions where students self-select
to provide a sequentially relevant second pair-part within
the current activity and how it is oriented to by co-participants,
particularly when the expected action is not accomplished. Using a
multimodal conversation analytic approach, it shows that students’
WTP is indexed as a social, public demonstration of one’s interest to
engage in the ongoing activity through displays of attentiveness to
unfolding interaction and learning activities, emerging turn-taking
and speakership establishment, engaging in foci of attention and
participation frameworks, and taking on relevant participant roles.
These findings indicate that WTP is not an absolute and fixed concept
but is rather constituted by different aspects or levels of engagement
displayed by the participants in interaction on a moment-by-moment
basis.
In the process of designing, piloting and revision of CLIL tasks and materials there were identified strategies for science teaching that incorporated specific teaching procedures aimed at promoting comprehension and production of messages in a foreign language which are usual for the foreign language classroom. Discussions emerged from the CLIL materials’ designing process caused a broad revision of pedagogical approaches to science teaching which can be generalized to ordinary L1 classrooms. Eventually, it became clear that there is a need for coordination across disciplines among Science and English teachers in the design and implementation of CLIL teaching sequences.
Books by Natalia Evnitskaya
Los objetivos declarados por TRI-CLIL fueron los de:
· Presentar y discutir los adelantos en investigación y práctica docente sobre AICLE en lenguas segundas y extranjeras en aulas inclusivas. · Estimular el acercamiento y el diálogo entre profesionales de la enseñanza y de la investigación sobre aprendizaje de lenguas, y hacer visible la relevancia del diálogo y la retroalimentación continuada entre ambos grupos de profesionales.
· Promover la investigación aplicada en didáctica del plurilingüismo.
· Contribuir a la superación de los prejuicios lingüísticos que frenan el aprendizaje de lenguas segundas y extranjeras.
· Dar a conocer a la comunidad educativa la actividad pedagógica e investigadora sobre programas AICLE actualmente en vigor.
From the aforementioned objectives it becomes apparent that TRI-CLIL was somewhat different from other recent events on CLIL pedagogy, which have tended to focus exclusively on linguistic issues and to specialise either in teaching techniques or in research. On the contrary, TRI-CLIL's main concern was to bring together specialists with different professional backgrounds and academic profiles and get them to sit together and discuss in order to create new, shared understandings of the benefits and challenges that plurilingual education poses for us.
Papers in conference proceedings by Natalia Evnitskaya
Edited conference proceedings by Natalia Evnitskaya
Conference Presentations by Natalia Evnitskaya
MA & PhD Theses by Natalia Evnitskaya
This PhD dissertation adopts Multimodal CA-for-CLIL as its analytical methodology, which combines current sociocultural perspectives on teaching-and-learning with methods provided by Conversation Analysis and Multimodal Analysis. The detailed examination of teacher-student interactions is divided into three studies. Each study takes on different sociocultural constructs that contribute to understand the teacher and students' participation in the co-construction of dialogic explanations in the CLIL science classroom. The following constructs are employed: study 1: 'mediated action' and a 'community of practice' (CoP) approach to learning; study 2: 'opacity' and 'density'; study 3 'interactional competence' (IC) and 'participation'. In a transversal way, all three studies apply the constructs 'classroom interactional competence' (CIC) and 'interactional scaffolding'. Taken together, the three studies enable the analyst to provide a more comprehensible, precise and deeper picture of the phenomenon under consideration.
Study 1 reveals that the participants employ an array of multimodal resources (e.g., languages; prosody; pauses; gaze, gesture, head movement; material artefacts) as powerful interactional mediating tools to establish a mutual focus within teaching-and-learning activities, negotiate meanings, develop shared understandings and co-construct dialogic explanations. All this evidences the participants' joint orientation towards the students' progress in talking school-science in the L2 and their gradual transformation into competent practitioners of their science classroom CoP.
Study 2 focuses on the way the participants signal and cooperatively tackle obstacles caused by L2 opacity and content density. It is found that the process of constructing science explanations is dialogic, teacher-led and student-centred. In this process the sequences of mediation and remediation are highly interwoven. On the other hand, the processes of the de-contextualization and re-contextualization of the interactional focus on lexical items render an effective pedagogical strategy for L2 teaching in the CLIL classroom.
Study 3 demonstrates that the students, particularly those who remain silent, efficiently mobilize multimodal resources to accomplish their varied ways of participating in classroom interaction and teacher-led activities. Thus, they display their developing IC in the L2. This allows assuming that the gradual acquisition by 'silent' students of new ways of displaying their participation in social practices of the CLIL classroom may favour the development of their IC. Another contribution of this piece of work is the elaboration of a tentative analytical framework for the identification and characterization of different participation patterns displayed by students in CLIL classrooms.
Transversally, the three studies depict a teacher who skilfully deploys CIC and a range of interactional scaffolding strategies to guide the students in their cooperative enterprise of teaching-and-learning school-science in the L2. It is suggested that in this way the teacher has fostered interaction in the L2 in the observed classroom and created space and tools favourable for the co-construction and problematization of academic (content and language) knowledge and a more active participation of the students in this process.
As a whole, the dissertation demonstrates that the adopted analytical approach has rendered very well suited to capturing and describing intricacies and specificities of the interactional process of co-constructing academic dialogic explanations in one CLIL science classroom. It therefore provides further evidence that Multimodal CA-for-CLIL may enable researchers to better understand the way particular social practices can be jointly and interactionally accomplished by participants in CLIL classrooms.
second language users, such as in CLIL and immersion settings. To illustrate the described methodological orientation, we briefly analyse one video-recorded interaction and conclude by suggesting research areas related to CLIL classrooms that could benefit from a multimodal CA perspective.
research on students’ participation in L1 and L2 classroom interaction
in teacher-fronted activities, this paper makes a step further by
presenting an exploratory study of students’ displays of willingness to
participate (WTP) in classroom interaction and pedagogical activities
across two educational and classroom settings (L2 classroom group
work and CLIL classroom whole-class activity), both of which are
characterized by the absence of teachers’ next-speaker selection
practices. The study focuses on occasions where students self-select
to provide a sequentially relevant second pair-part within
the current activity and how it is oriented to by co-participants,
particularly when the expected action is not accomplished. Using a
multimodal conversation analytic approach, it shows that students’
WTP is indexed as a social, public demonstration of one’s interest to
engage in the ongoing activity through displays of attentiveness to
unfolding interaction and learning activities, emerging turn-taking
and speakership establishment, engaging in foci of attention and
participation frameworks, and taking on relevant participant roles.
These findings indicate that WTP is not an absolute and fixed concept
but is rather constituted by different aspects or levels of engagement
displayed by the participants in interaction on a moment-by-moment
basis.
In the process of designing, piloting and revision of CLIL tasks and materials there were identified strategies for science teaching that incorporated specific teaching procedures aimed at promoting comprehension and production of messages in a foreign language which are usual for the foreign language classroom. Discussions emerged from the CLIL materials’ designing process caused a broad revision of pedagogical approaches to science teaching which can be generalized to ordinary L1 classrooms. Eventually, it became clear that there is a need for coordination across disciplines among Science and English teachers in the design and implementation of CLIL teaching sequences.
Los objetivos declarados por TRI-CLIL fueron los de:
· Presentar y discutir los adelantos en investigación y práctica docente sobre AICLE en lenguas segundas y extranjeras en aulas inclusivas. · Estimular el acercamiento y el diálogo entre profesionales de la enseñanza y de la investigación sobre aprendizaje de lenguas, y hacer visible la relevancia del diálogo y la retroalimentación continuada entre ambos grupos de profesionales.
· Promover la investigación aplicada en didáctica del plurilingüismo.
· Contribuir a la superación de los prejuicios lingüísticos que frenan el aprendizaje de lenguas segundas y extranjeras.
· Dar a conocer a la comunidad educativa la actividad pedagógica e investigadora sobre programas AICLE actualmente en vigor.
From the aforementioned objectives it becomes apparent that TRI-CLIL was somewhat different from other recent events on CLIL pedagogy, which have tended to focus exclusively on linguistic issues and to specialise either in teaching techniques or in research. On the contrary, TRI-CLIL's main concern was to bring together specialists with different professional backgrounds and academic profiles and get them to sit together and discuss in order to create new, shared understandings of the benefits and challenges that plurilingual education poses for us.
This PhD dissertation adopts Multimodal CA-for-CLIL as its analytical methodology, which combines current sociocultural perspectives on teaching-and-learning with methods provided by Conversation Analysis and Multimodal Analysis. The detailed examination of teacher-student interactions is divided into three studies. Each study takes on different sociocultural constructs that contribute to understand the teacher and students' participation in the co-construction of dialogic explanations in the CLIL science classroom. The following constructs are employed: study 1: 'mediated action' and a 'community of practice' (CoP) approach to learning; study 2: 'opacity' and 'density'; study 3 'interactional competence' (IC) and 'participation'. In a transversal way, all three studies apply the constructs 'classroom interactional competence' (CIC) and 'interactional scaffolding'. Taken together, the three studies enable the analyst to provide a more comprehensible, precise and deeper picture of the phenomenon under consideration.
Study 1 reveals that the participants employ an array of multimodal resources (e.g., languages; prosody; pauses; gaze, gesture, head movement; material artefacts) as powerful interactional mediating tools to establish a mutual focus within teaching-and-learning activities, negotiate meanings, develop shared understandings and co-construct dialogic explanations. All this evidences the participants' joint orientation towards the students' progress in talking school-science in the L2 and their gradual transformation into competent practitioners of their science classroom CoP.
Study 2 focuses on the way the participants signal and cooperatively tackle obstacles caused by L2 opacity and content density. It is found that the process of constructing science explanations is dialogic, teacher-led and student-centred. In this process the sequences of mediation and remediation are highly interwoven. On the other hand, the processes of the de-contextualization and re-contextualization of the interactional focus on lexical items render an effective pedagogical strategy for L2 teaching in the CLIL classroom.
Study 3 demonstrates that the students, particularly those who remain silent, efficiently mobilize multimodal resources to accomplish their varied ways of participating in classroom interaction and teacher-led activities. Thus, they display their developing IC in the L2. This allows assuming that the gradual acquisition by 'silent' students of new ways of displaying their participation in social practices of the CLIL classroom may favour the development of their IC. Another contribution of this piece of work is the elaboration of a tentative analytical framework for the identification and characterization of different participation patterns displayed by students in CLIL classrooms.
Transversally, the three studies depict a teacher who skilfully deploys CIC and a range of interactional scaffolding strategies to guide the students in their cooperative enterprise of teaching-and-learning school-science in the L2. It is suggested that in this way the teacher has fostered interaction in the L2 in the observed classroom and created space and tools favourable for the co-construction and problematization of academic (content and language) knowledge and a more active participation of the students in this process.
As a whole, the dissertation demonstrates that the adopted analytical approach has rendered very well suited to capturing and describing intricacies and specificities of the interactional process of co-constructing academic dialogic explanations in one CLIL science classroom. It therefore provides further evidence that Multimodal CA-for-CLIL may enable researchers to better understand the way particular social practices can be jointly and interactionally accomplished by participants in CLIL classrooms.