The Oral Discourse in CLIL Lessons: A Functional Perspective

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is a teaching approach that has recently gained some popularity amongst Japanese tertiary education institutions. The key point in this approach is the dual-focused in teaching language and content while at the same time providing students with opportunities to learn how to use the language in their particular field of study. The purpose of this paper is to show the similarities and differences in two instructors’ oral instructional discourse when teaching Academic English and CLIL lessons in the light of a methodological functional approach from Christie (1991) based on curriculum genres in the educational setting. The choice of this approach is further motivated by the theoretical indebtedness in Christie’s work to: a) the uses of Systemic Functional Linguistics for the interpretation of how language works in educational and other social settings in terms of the schematic structure potential of each genre; and b) Bernstein’s ideas of regulative and instructional language as part of language learning as a social process.