Building literacies in secondary school history: The specific contribution of academic writing support

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21283/2376905X.10.149

Keywords:

CONTENT AND LANGUAGE INTEGRATED LEARNING (CLIL), BILINGUAL EDUCATION, DISCIPLINARY LITERACY, L2 WRITING, COGNITIVE DISCOURSE FUNCTIONS

Abstract

This paper considers the specific role and effect of academic writing support in a secondary school Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) context. After discussing the potential place for academic writing support in the ongoing process of fostering disciplinary literacy, we report on an experimental study in which 45 Spanish secondary school students received a short academic writing module as part of their history course. The descriptions/explanations written in their post-tests were generally found to be more complete, with more explicit discourse markers and with better textual organization than the pre-tests. We discuss the implications of this for students’ progress towards disciplinary literacy.

Author Biographies

Ruth Breeze, Universidad de Navarra

Ruth Breeze is a senior lecturer in English at the Universidad de Navarra, Spain, where she combines teaching with research as a member of the GradUN Research Group in the Instituto Cultura y Sociedad. Her most recent books are Corporate Discourse (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015) and the edited volumes Interpersonality in legal genres (Peter Lang, 2014), Essential competencies for English-medium university teaching (Springer, 2016), and Power, persuasion and manipulation in specialised genres (Peter Lang, 2017). She teaches and supervises PhD candidates in the area of language education, and she has published widely on language teaching, CLIL, specialized languages, and discourse analysis.

Pilar Gerns Jiménez-Villarejo, Universidad de Navarra

Pilar Gerns Jiménez-Villarejo is a doctoral student at the Universidad de Navarra, Spain, under the supervision of Prof. Breeze. As a researcher in the School of Education, she has some teaching assignments in the Department of Research Theory and Methods in Education. She has a degree in Philosophy from the Universidad de Navarra and one in English Studies from the UNED, as well as a Masters in Teaching Social Science and Foreign Languages in Secondary School from the Universidad de Santiago. Her current research is focused on the literacy development of secondary students in a natural science CLIL context. She is currently conducting two field studies to empirically analyze the effects of working with cognitive discourse function on students’ literacy development.

Cover Image for Volume 6 Issue 1 August 2019

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Published

2019-08-31

How to Cite

Breeze, R., & Gerns Jiménez-Villarejo, P. (2019). Building literacies in secondary school history: The specific contribution of academic writing support. EuroAmerican Journal of Applied Linguistics and Languages, 6(1), 21–36. https://doi.org/10.21283/2376905X.10.149

Issue

Vol. 6 No. 1 (2019)

Section

Research Articles - Regular Issue

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Copyright (c) 2019 Ruth Breeze

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.