Co-construction of knowledge in primary CLIL group work activities

Abstract

The present study addresses the integrative aspect in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) by focusing on the integration of language and content in group work sessions in the CLIL primary classroom. In the pursuit of operationalising the connection that takes place between language, content and cognition, it puts forward a multi-layered analytical model. The data used in this research was collected by the researcher in 2015 in two grade 4 (age 9–10) primary classrooms in a private bilingual school in the northeast area of Madrid, Spain. Both classes performed two types of small group discussion activities: (a) a science topic discussion activity (STA) and (b) a problem-solving activity (PSA). The data was examined using the multi-layered analytical model designed in the present study that comprises a discourse, a knowledge and an interactional layer. The results show that, in the discourse and knowledge layers, CLIL students favour the use of facts and evaluations when producing initiating turns and try to reach a final agreement when ending them. In general, they seem concerned with the understanding. With regard to registers, they favour the instructional register (the register used to deal with academic content). Within group interaction, students’ participation in the discussion in CLIL groups was unequally distributed. Their interaction pattern described an expert/novice pattern instead of a collaborative one.