Teachers’ Uses of Cognitive Discourse Functions in Elementary-level CLIL Classrooms

Abstract

Due to the impacts of globalization English has become the world’s lingua franca (ELF) Non-native English users have outnumbered native English speakers in the world which implies the ownership of English is no longer limited to native speakers (Graddol 2006) As Kramsch (2014) pointed out English pedagogies have become more communicative and interactive to meet the needs of using English as a lingua franca in many aspects of life nowadays To prepare her citizens to meet the global requirements Tainan City Government began an experiment of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) teaching approach on providing primary subject matter education in English to young students in 2017 The project sought chances to create authentic language-using environment for young students while learning content knowledge and to achieve the goal to make English her second official language Previous literature mostly focuses on students’ learning outcomes designing of lesson plans and teachers’ perspectives toward CLIL in European contexts Very little effort has been put into the understanding of how content and language can be integrated through pedagogical discourse This study takes advantage of Dalton-Puffer’s (2013 2015) construct of cognitive discourse functions (CDFs) to investigate CLIL teachers’ discourse with young students in Tainan City to understand the convergence of content knowledge and language uses in Asian contexts Findings of the study indicate that all of the three participating teachers used a great amount of EXPLORE and DESCRIBE among the 7 types of CDF in their teaching Besides the three teachers had high frequencies in using different CDFs which could be due to three factors: (1) the nature of the academic subjects (2) the selected teaching materials and (3) the designed learning tasks

Date of Award	2020
Original language	English
Supervisor	Shin-Mei Kao (Supervisor)