Affording students opportunities for the integrated learning of content and language: A contrastive study on classroom interactional strategies deployed by two CLIL teachers

© 2013 Joaquim Arnau and the authors of individual chapters. All rights reserved. This paper is concerned with content and language integrated learning (CLIL) in English as a foreign language in secondary education in Catalonia. Through the use of tools from conversation analysis and sociocultural discourse analysis, the study contrasts the way two different CLIL teachers organise and manage, respectively, an academic conversation. Its goal is to empirically identify components of classroom interactional competence (Walsh, 2006), present in the particular conditions of CLIL settings, by showing how the teachers’ instructional choices in the form of conversational adjustments afford students more or fewer opportunities for the integrated learning of language and content. The study concludes that the different sets of conversational strategies deployed by each teacher determine the quality of each conversation and its outcomes in terms of affordances for the integrated learning of content and language.