Why Schools Matter: An Ethnographic and Ecological Approach to Understanding Language-in-education Policy

Speaker: Dr Peter DE COSTA (Michigan State University, USA)

How to integrate content learning with language learning has been a central issue in current research on CLIL (Dalton-Puffer et al.,2010). In this paper I present our experience in developing an innovative approach, ‘Concept+Language Mapping’ (CLM) (Lin & He, 2017; He & Lin, 2019), by drawing on Lemke (1990)’s ‘thematic patterns’ theory to tackle the challenge of integrating language scaffolding into the teaching of complex content topics in secondary science classrooms in Hong Kong. Implications for content-based language education as well as ‘language aware’ content education will be discussed