Disciplinary language at school: Sites of integration in content-and-language-integrated learning (CLIL)

The teaching of languages in Europe emphasises the learning of English, increasingly with a view towards using it in a professional and academic environment. One development over the last few decades in response to this demand for more specialised English proficiency has been the introduction of Content-and-Language-Integrated Learning (CLIL). One of the major benefits of CLIL lies in its potential in fostering language abilities that relate directly to the school subjects taught through the integrated learning of new content and new aspects of the foreign language. I aim to contribute here to our conceptualisation of this nexus by positing and presenting evidence for a dual perspective of disciplinary language. This definition embraces both the production of lexico-grammatical and discursive patterns appropriate to the subject being taught and the verbal and multimodal practices associated with acquiring them.