Guided by the genre-based pedagogy, teachers may try out the CLIL/LAC activities in their own classroom teaching. To design a CLIL lesson, it is very necessary that the subject teacher have specific objectives about both content teaching and language teaching. The "Genre-egg" Model (Lin, 2010) may act as a useful analytical framework for subject teachers to analyse the language features (including curriculum register (field, tenor and mode), academic text-types, academic functions, sentence patterns, lexico-grammar and academic vocabulary) that are typical of the curriculum context and hence especially important for the meaning-making of the subject content in the unit.
When planning a CLIL lesson, apart from setting the content teaching objectives, the subject teacher may try to decide on the language teaching objectives by analysing the corresponding text that introduces the relevant subject content in the unit. By identifying the language features at different layers of the "Genre-egg" that are especially critical for the understanding and expression of the subject content, the subject teacher may incorporate these language features into the design of the different pedagogical activities in the CLIL lesson.
Figure cited from Lin, A. M. Y. (forthcoming). Language across the curriculum: theory and practice. Dordrecht: Springer (Chapter 5: Curriculum Mapping and Bridging Pedagogies )
For example, when planning the Biology lesson in "The human digestive system"(Oxford Master Science (3A)), the teacher had decided on the content teaching objectives including the types, structure, shapes, functions and sets of teeth. In order to enable the students to talk/write about the Biology content in an academic way, she needed to teach students a set of academic language features that are particularly relevant to the theme of the subject content. She thus planned to guide her students to identify how biology professionals (e.g. textbook writers) introduce the social purpose (i.e. to describe teeth systematically), under what situation (register) is this Descriptive Report (genre) used, how it is structured (stages and phases), what academic functions are relevant (e.g. definitions, descriptions, classifications, comparisons, exemplifications, etc.), how these academic functions are realised by different sentence patterns, and how the sentences are realised by different kinds of academic vocabulary (field-specific words, general academic words and signalling words). All these key elements were analysed, highlighted and noted on a lesson plan template (see figure on the right). Through guiding students to do detailed reading of the text and deconstructing the language features at different levels, the teacher helped students to master a language-related learning strategy---a linguistic analytical tool which well prepares them for the different learning activities that demand academic reading and writing about the subject.
When designing teaching and learning activities, teachers may also integrate the teaching of both academic content knowledge and academic literacy skills into the subject learning tasks. For example, when teaching the process of human digestion and absorption, the teacher designed a "Jigsaw Reading" activity which encourages students to explore collaboratively the content knowledge by identifying information from texts (text reading), completing graphic organisers (vocabulary writing), completing sentences based on the information in the graphic organisers (graphic organiser reading and sentence writing), rearranging sentences into coherent texts (sentence reading and text writing). To fulfill the "Jigsaw Reading" task, students also need to talk with each other about the subject matter knowledge as members of different groups read and write different texts and graphic organisers. In this way, the subject matter knowledge is jointly constructed through a series of decoding, encoding and communicating information in verbal or visual texts. Language features at different levels (vocabulary, sentence and text) were practised and reinforced during the process of the jigsaw reading.
Textbooks are essential teaching materials for all subject teaching. However, many school students (e.g. the South Asian students in this HKU-QEF Project) do not want to learn the subjects based on their textbooks. This is partially due to the disconnect between the ‘key-word approach’ to content learning (Lin, forthcoming) as characterised by many secondary school textbooks and the challenging essay-type tasks at the final stage secondary school assessments (e.g. HKDSE). To address this disconnect, teachers may re-edit the textbooks based on the linguistic characteristics of the subject matter knowledge. For example, to encourage students to revise the lessons, the teacher re-edited the texts ("The human circulatory system", Oxford Master Science (3A)) in the textbook into text handouts. In these re-edited texts, the subject content is presented in coherent texts with clear stages/phases arranged according to the genre of the text. The different sentence patterns which express the key academic functions are highlighted to raise students' awareness about the language use. During the revision lesson, the handouts were distributed and became useful collaborative and self-directed learning materials. By asking guided reading questions, the teacher scaffolded the students to identify how the academic functions are realised by the different sentence patterns. She also demonstrated explicitly how the content knowledge of the whole unit can be connected by the systematic stages/phases in a meta-genre, e.g., a compositional report which consists of other genres such as descriptive and procedural reports.
It should not be mistaken that the discussion of language features in a CLIL lesson is not simply repeating what English teachers do in their language subjects. The focus on the language features in the subject lessons is not just to develop students' academic English literacy (although it reinforces students' English language knowledge at the same time); more importantly, the enhanced academic language awareness will enable students to comprehend, talk and write about the subject matter in a cognitively and linguistically correct way which is crucial for building up their confidence in learning the subject. For example, at the end of the semester, based on the "Genre-egg" Model, subject teachers may compile revision materials (See figures below) to help students revise the lessons more systematically by drawing their attention to the relationship between language and content and how the language-related learning strategies can help them to understand and memorise the subject content more effectively.
