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TRABAJO FIN DE ESTUDIOS

Speech and gesture: mediating language learning incontent and language integrated learning

classrooms (CLIL)

Ana Hermoso González

MASTER EN PERSPECTIVAS LINGÜISTICAS Y LITERARIAS SOBRE EL TEXTO

Tutores: María del Pilar Agustín Llach y Almudena Fernández FontechaFacultad de Letras y de la Educación

Curso 2011-2012

© El autor© Universidad de La Rioja, Servicio de Publicaciones, 2012

publicaciones.unirioja.esE-mail: [email protected]

Speech and gesture: mediating language learning in content and languageintegrated learning classrooms (CLIL), trabajo fin de estudios

de Ana Hermoso González, dirigido por María del Pilar Agustín Llach y AlmudenaFernández Fontecha (publicado por la Universidad de La Rioja), se difunde bajo una

LicenciaCreative Commons Reconocimiento-NoComercial-SinObraDerivada 3.0 Unported.Permisos que vayan más allá de lo cubierto por esta licencia pueden solicitarse a los

titulares del copyright.

SPEECH AND GESTURE: MEDIATING LANGUAGE LEARNING IN CONTENT AND LANGUAGE INTEGRATED

LEARNING CLASSROOMS (CLIL). HABLA Y GESTO: SU MEDIACIÓN EN EL APRENDIZAJE DE LENGUAS EN EL AULA AICLE (APRENDIZAJE INTEGRADO

DE CONTENIDOS Y LENGUAS EXTRANJERAS).

Ana Hermoso González 20011/2012

Máster en Perspectivas lingüísticas y literarias sobre el texto. Supervisors: Dra. María Pilar Agustín Llach, Dra. Almudena Fernández Fontecha.

ACKNOWLEDMENTS:

Quisiera dar las gracias a las personas encargadas

del Departamento de Lenguas Modernas de la Universidad

de la Rioja por acogerme tan gratamente.

Agradecer sobre todo a mis tutoras y amigas, María

Pilar y Almudena por sus palabras de apoyo y comprensión.

Siempre pendientes de mí y mis circunstancias.

Finalmente quiero dedicar estas líneas a mis padres,

que han sido mi ayuda y compañía en mis mejores momentos

y sobre todo en aquellos no tan buenos….. mis remos para

evitar ir a la deriva.

I n t r o d u c t i o n | 3

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................... 5

PART I: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

2. CONTENT AND LANGUAGE INTEGRATED LEARNING (CLIL)……….........11

2.1 Main features ............................................................................................................. 13

3. THE CLASSROOM AS A DISCOURSE SPACE..………………….…..................15

3.1 The classroom as a structured experience ................................................................. 16

3.2 Whole-class interaction and the IRF cycle ................................................................ 18

3.3 The role of interaction in second language learning ................................................. 23

4. THE CLASSROOM AS A MULTIMODAL SPACE…………………………........24

4.1 Semiotic modes: visuals ............................................................................................ 24

4.1.1 Gestures ............................................................................................................ 26

4.1.2 McNeill’s Typology of gestures ........................................................................ 27

5. SCAFFOLDING IN THE CLIL CLASSROOM ……………………...………........28

5.1 Definition ................................................................................................................... 28

5.2 Scaffolding functions ................................................................................................. 31

5.3 Scaffolding Tools ...................................................................................................... 33

5.3. 1 Teacher questions in CLIL ................................................................................ 33

5.3. 2 Teacher gestures in CLIL .................................................................................. 35


PART II: THE STUDY: METHODOLOGY, RESULTS AND DISCUSSION.

6. METHODOLOGY…………………………………………………….……….........38

6.1 Research questions .................................................................................................... 38

6.2 Pilot Study ................................................................................................................ 39

6.2.1 Setting ................................................................................................................ 39

6.2.2 Class Materials ................................................................................................... 40

6.2.3 Participants ......................................................................................................... 41

6.2.4 Data Collection ................................................................................................... 41

6.2.5 Classroom Data .................................................................................................. 42

7. RESULTS…………………………………………………………………..…..........44

7.1 In CLIL classroom interaction, is input being modified in order to facilitate learners’

understanding? .............................................................................................................. 44

7.2 If input is being modified, are gestures and speech semantically and pragmatically

coexpressive? ................................................................................................................... 47

7.3 Is there any difference in use of questions and gestures depending on the

pedagogical purposes? ..................................................................................................... 64

8. DISCUSSION………………………………………………………….……….........66

9. SOME CONCLUDING REMARKS………………………………….……….........72

REFERENCES………………………………………………………..………..............74

APPENDIX…………………………………………………………...………..............84


1 Introduction

Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it

by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover

with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.

Plato

Multilingualism is no longer a “foreign” term, but a concept that describes the

reality of much of our society and culture. Learning other languages is a life-long task to

be encouraged in the process of European Integration where Europe “has to find its

balance between preservation and promotion of cultural diversity and the development

of a common communicative sphere” (Breidbach, 2003:7). Since both of these elements

are vital aspects of social inclusion, the Council of Europe supports an intensification of

language learning because “it is only through a better knowledge of European modern

languages that it will be possible to facilitate communication and interaction among

Europeans of different mother tongues in order to promote European mobility, mutual

understanding and co-operation, and overcome prejudice and discrimination” (Common

European Framework of Reference for Languages, 2001: 2).

Unfortunately, foreign language learning is not a strong point in Spanish

education. According to the Eurobarometer survey conducted in 2005 on the Europeans’

perception about their command of foreign languages, just 36% of the respondents aged

15 and over asserted that they were able to engage in a conversation in a language other


than their mother tongue (European Commission, 2005). That is to say, after being

taught a foreign language during all or most of their school years, 64% of the Spanish

participants, more than half of the respondents, are able to communicate only in their

mother tongue. In order to amend this situation, the national government of Spain and

the local administrations in the different autonomous communities are progressively

changing their educational policies and allocating more resources to bilingual education

in the EFL classroom at the secondary, primary and pre-school levels (L.O.E. 2/2006;

Orden 5766/2006). Consequently, traditional foreign language classes are gradually

becoming a context where the FL (foreign language) constitutes not only the content but

also the means of instruction in other subjects.

It is clear that the usual way in which children learn their first language can be

used to acquire other languages. Following this idea, CLIL (Content and Language

Integrated Learning) presents a natural situation for language development while it

builds on other types of learning as it affects the learner’s motivation. Learning to use

the foreign language appropriately in communication implies that our students need to

know how to develop general and linguistic competences. According to the Common

European Framework for Languages (CEFR):

“In order to carry out the tasks and activities required to deal with the communicative situations in which they are involved, users and learners draw upon a number of competences developed in the course of their previous experience. In return, participation in communicative events (including, of course, those events specifically designed to promote language learning) results in the further development of the learner’s competences, for both immediate and long-term use” (CERF, 2001: 101)

Therefore, there is a shift in the theoretical framework which gives way to a

more communicative perspective of language teaching and learning. In fact, different

models of communicative competence within Second Language Acquisition theory

(Hymes, 1972; Canale and Swain, 1980) emphasize the importance of the pragmatic

competence in the process of teaching and learning the L2 (Bachman, 1990; Muñoz,

2000).

Since pragmatic competence refers to the learners’ ability to employ their

linguistic resources and sociocultural knowledge appropriately for a given context, it is

important to focus on how meaning is created and how it is represented in the


communicative interaction. The language classroom may be viewed as a complex

scenario where the choices the speaker makes, i.e. how/why meaning is instantiated

through an either/or wording (Crystal, 1985; Rose and Kasper, 2001) determine the

quality and quantity of the input acquired (Long, 1981). In the case of CLIL, classroom

interaction is always conducted using the L2, and controlled primarily by the teacher.

Therefore, it is essential to pay attention to the main interlocutor who provides the

foreign language input, his/her communicative choices, and the way input is modified.

The instructor needs to have at hand a variety of tools and strategies which may work as

an essential teacher’s support in order to achieve comprehension in L2 learning. Being

CLIL classroom a multimodal and social setting, it is necessary for the teachers to be

conscious of the role of gestures and other visuals in using strategies such as

scaffolding.

Hence, this research focuses on a multimodal vision of classroom interaction. In

light of the available evidence and the research completed so far, we intend to delve into

the phenomenon of a single underlying verbal-gestural process of constructing and

presenting meanings, where the utterance has both an imagistic side (represented by

gestures) and a linguistic side (represented by language) (McNeill, 1992). As McNeill

(1992: 19) points out, “gestures do convey meanings and their expressiveness is not

necessarily inferior to that of language. If one knows how to “read” them, the gesture

can convey meaning no less than language, but the method used by the gesture for

doing this is fundamentally different from that of language”. The present study is thus

meant as a multimodal analysis of CLIL whole-classroom interaction in two different

modes, namely, verbal and visual.

Motivated by the intrinsic relationship between the teacher’s and learner’s

linguistic production in order to create meaning in EFL or bilingual classrooms, this

research is predicated on the idea that speech does not convey all information, and that a

multimodal scenario where a wide range of semiotic modes operates, gives teachers the

possibility of interacting with their students in a more effective way (Arnold, 1999;

Kress, 2001; Stein, 2000). Based on previous studies which focus on mediation in

classroom interaction (Vygotsky, 1978) where input is being modified to achieve


comprehensibility (Long, 1981; Swain, 1985), and following McNeill’s theories that

speech and gestures are a unified mechanism, the main objective here is to see how this

adjustment occurs in both modes as part of a scaffolding process.

Therefore, this study was undertaken due to the following:

(a) The need to observe if teacher-modified verbal and non-verbal input in

bilingual (CLIL) programs is used as a main tool in a scaffolding process.

(b) The need to observe if gestures and speech are truly integral parts of a single

process, with the gesture manifesting imagery that is inherent in this process

at an early stage.

For that reason, our analysis concentrates on a specific scaffolding function

(McCormick and Donato, 2000; Wood, Bruner and Ross, 1976) in the instructional

register (Christie, 2000) within CLIL whole-classroom interaction (Hatch, 1992;

Dalton-Puffer, 2007). In this research questions and gestures were observed, as we

assume this kind of input is modified in the I-R-F exchange for the sake of learners’

understanding. So if this is the case, there is a possibility of having gestures and speech

expressing the same semantic and pragmatic concepts; or on the other hand, each mode

can be used differently depending on the pedagogical purposes in the CLIL classroom.

The work that follows is then divided into two main parts: Part I. Theoretical

Background, Part II. The study: methodology, results and discussion. Part I devotes four

sections to the theoretical background of the study. Section 1 addresses Content and

Language Integrated Learning (CLIL). Sections 2 and 3 are concerned with the

classroom as a discourse and multimodal space. The intention of these sections is also to

provide a global characterization of the lesson not only as a speech, but also as a visual

event. Section 4 is centred on scaffolding as an essential strategy on CLIL teaching and

learning. Part III presents the study. Section 5 deals with the methodology that was

conducted in order to obtain the data upon which this research is founded. It describes

the data collection process, provides information on the participants, the schools and the


lessons which have been studied in this work. The quantitative and qualitative results

are presented in Section 6, devoted to describing the results and answering the research

questions formulated above. Finally, Section 7 includes a discussion of the results and

in Section 8 contains some conclusions regarding both the pedagogical implications of

the present findings as well as possible directions to follow for further research in this

area.

T h e o r e t i c a l F r a m e w o r k | 10

2 Theoretical Framework

[Keating stands on his desk]

John Keating: Why do I stand up here? Anybody? Dalton: To feel taller!

John Keating: No! [Dings a bell with his foot] Thank you for playing Mr. Dalton. I stand upon my desk to

remind myself that we must constantly look at things in a different way. Dead Poets Society-

This research’s theoretical framework is based on fundamental linguistic fields:

Pragmatics, Classroom Discourse Analysis, Sociocultural Theory, and Second

Language Acquisition; to that one should add the contribution of Non-verbal

communication studies and Cognitive theories of language.

First, the study of communicative functions is subsumed under the field of

Pragmatics (Morris, 1938), which provides the context for language to be viewed as a

“relation of signs to interpreters” (1983:6). The fact that pragmatics is primarily

concerned with both the study of the speaker’s transmission of meaning and contextual

meaning is crucial to this research which focuses mainly on a speaker’s choices during

interaction with others. Thus, meaning is not regarded as a static concept, but rather as a

dynamic process which is negotiated during communication (Thomas, 1995;

Verschueren, 1999; LoCastro, 2003; Crystal, 1985).

Second, since this investigation explores spoken classroom interaction,

Classroom Discourse Analysis (henceforth CDA) (Sinclair and Brazil, 1982; Sinclair

and Coulthard, 1992; Wells, 1993), and particularly, Sinclair and Coulthard’s 1992

work are used as the main references. The findings of these two scholars have provided


a detailed analysis of naturally occurring classroom talk from a linguistic and analytical

vantage point. The area where their analytic scheme has actually been most influential is

at the level of Move, especially with those moves which make up the “Teaching

Exchange”. This is the habitat of the Initiation-Response-Feedback (IRF)-sequence of

which throughout this research supports the analysis of knowledge construction.

Furthermore, our work also gives attention to a special aspect of Sociocultural Theory

(Vygotsky, 1978, 1986), namely the dialogic nature of language and interaction where

the scaffolding metaphor originates and which is the phenomenon credited with

facilitating not only subject learning, but language learning as well (Gibbons, 2002;

Mercer, 1995; Donato, 1994; Wells, 1993).

Finally, Second Language Acquisition (henceforth SLA) research findings offer

guidance on issues such as comprehensible input (Swain, 1985), teacher-learner

exchange (Long and Sato, 1983) and the use of teachers’ questions in classroom

interaction studied in ESL or EFL contexts (Long, 1981; Musumeci, 1996; McCormick

and Donato; 2000; Romero and Llinares, 2001; Dalton-Puffer, 2007). Moreover, due to

the multimodal perspective of this study, Non-verbal communication studies and

Cognitive theories are also considered (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 1996; Arnold, 1999;

Stein, 2000; Kress, 2001; Walsh, 2007; Cienki, 2008), especially those that deal with

integration of gesture and speech (Kendon, 2004; McNeill, 1992, 2005).

2. CONTENT AND LANGUAGE INTEGRATED LEARNING (CLIL)

Our research’s theoretical framework is then applied to a FL classroom, but not

a common one. The term Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) refers to a

dual-focus educational approach in which an additional language, other than the

students’ mother tongue, is used for the learning and teaching of both content and

language. While this methodology can be used in any L2, in both the present study and

educational reality, English is the language of communication, as it is has been and is

today the most widely taught foreign language. A whole gamut of terms are used to

refer to the same phenomena that, as Nikula (2007) notes, they only differ on the


emphasis they place on language and content: Content-Based-Instruction (CBI),

Bilingual Teaching, English Across the Curriculum, Dual Language Programs,

Immersion, Content-based ESL/language instruction and many more. Due to its strong

position in the European context, throughout this study, I will be using the term Content

and Language Integrated Learning or its acronym CLIL.

The way students learn the language and the content can be seen from different

perspectives depending on the lenses of the language learning theory we use to consider

empirical findings. In this respect, we agree with Dalton-Puffer’s (2007) idea of CLIL

as a context where a constructivist and participatory learning process takes place.

Therefore, the learner relies on his/her already existing cognitive structures when

selecting and transforming information during the learning process (Bruner, 1966;

1990). That is to say, cognitive structures (e.g. schemata, mental models) thus invest

immediate experience with meaning and allow the individual to integrate new

information into their own knowledge system. The teacher then should present input in

a way that matches the learner´s current state of understanding and encourages the

student to discover the principles by him or herself.

Constructivist theories tend to see the learning process as an individual act, but

also as a reaction to the experiences from the environment. In this sense, there is a

connection between this idea and the second influential type of learning theory that

considers learning as a result of social interaction where acquisition of knowledge

occurs due to practice. Interaction with society is crucial in the development of

cognition, so that higher cognitive functions are not conceivable without the

individual´s interaction with his or her social environment. As Vygotsky (1978) points

out:

Every function on the child´s cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relationships between individuals (p.57).

Another important aspect of Vygotsky’s theory has to do with what he calls the

“zone of proximal development” (ZPD), that is, the difference between what a learner


can do without help and what he or she can do with help. The child follows an adult's

example and gradually develops the ability to do certain tasks without help or

assistance. The concept of scaffolding is closely related to the ZPD, a process through

which a teacher or more competent peer gives aid to the student in her/his ZPD as

necessary, and tapers off this aid as it becomes unnecessary. There is a short step

between this notion and the importance of natural-social interaction of CLIL education,

the significance of the learner group and their transactions within their educational

speech community, which is one of the cornerstones of the present study.

2.1 Main Features

Despite their differences, all CLIL models share common features that unify

them into a single dual-focused approach. Our study focuses in the L2 exposure, the

authenticity of materials in CLIL models, the visual support, and finally its redundancy

(Fernández Fontecha, 2008)

L2 Exposure

Not only quantity of exposure is proved to benefit the process of learning a

language but also quality (Fernández Fontecha, 2008; Marsh, 2000; Muñoz, 2002;

Stevens, 1983). In this respect, CLIL provides opportunities for learning through

acquisition rather than through explicit teaching and this may contribute to “the creation

of rich learning environments and may allow language contextualization” (Fernández

Fontecha, 2008: 20).

Authenticity of materials

As one of the main objectives of CLIL is to transform classrooms into “streets”

(Dalton-Puffer, 2007), real situations are brought into the class by means of authentic

materials, i.e. materials designed for non-educational purposes, and by devising tasks of

our everyday life such as role-plays. CLIL models can easily integrate strategies and

techniques from other methods. Hence, following an action-oriented approach the CLIL


learner is able to interact as a social member of a community learning contents to apply

them in real contexts.

Visual support

It is necessary to consider the potential of visual input and its relationship with

language in the teaching and learning context and more specifically in CLIL, where a

second language is used to convey other notions than the purely linguistic ones. In this

sense, Barthes (1977) uses two terms to refer to these relations created between the

image and the language: “anchorage” for relations in which the words limit the

polysemy of the image (i.e. an instruction to a scientific illustration) and “relay” for

relations in which the words and the pictures each contribute to the interpretation (i.e.

charts or posters that show teachers’ explanations). Thus, visual input seem to be in a

L2 class a main source of information that complements the words not only for students,

but also for teachers, to the extent that most of them agree on the idea that there are a

number of advantages when presenting the concepts with visual support or just visually.

Teachers should apply a wide range of knowledge organizers such as graphs,

tables, charts, mind maps, etc. in order the students to follow easily their discourse

(Early, 1989; Early and Tang, 1991; Mohan, 1986). As Marsh (2008: 146) points out,

“information is better absorbed when it is packaged into digestive bites that can be

seen”. Furthermore, the teacher´s full meaning is carried, not only by words alone, but

by the combination of words and gestures (McNeill, 1992).

Redundancy

Knowledge cannot be acquired if concepts have not been understood completely.

If that is the case, teachers should be aware that the construction of a phrase that

presents some idea using more information, often via multiple means, is a crucial

technique to be applied in their discourse. According to Navés (2002), “in presenting

new information CLIL teachers use appropriate strategies such as (…) building

redundancy (…) to make input comprehensible and context-embedded”


3. THE CLASSROOM AS A DISCOURSE SPACE

Based on previous research, the present study focuses on the key points which

characterize classroom discourse as one specific kind of languaged social activity. The

tradition of research on instructional talk that we are referring to started in the 60s and

70s due to a growing interest in studies of language interaction inside the classroom.

Within this context, the work of Barnes (1969) was illuminating as he made detailed

and interesting observations on the kinds of questions teachers ask and the way in which

these constrain pupils´ thinking and participation. However, it was the work of Bellack

et al. (1966) who really influenced the descriptive models later developed by discourse

analysts. Thanks to them, the concepts of “move” and “teaching cycle” were introduced.

Alongside this tradition there was also an interest in the sociology of education.

The notion that participants in educational settings act out predefined social roles was

adapted to the classroom life, which is now considered to embody the power relations

that hold in society at large (Edwards and Mercer 1987). In this respect, Mehan (1979)

gave a detailed evidence of how language is used in the classroom to achieve

organization and social order. The study of the establishment of social order via action

was, however, a concern of the discipline of pragmatics. Language then relies on and

simultaneously co-determines the situation in which is used (Ehlich 1991; Hatch, 1992).

Ehlich and Rehbein’s work (1986) on particular examine language use in school as an

institutionalized social activity. Their main argument is that much of the real world

problems that happened in the past have already been solved on a societal level, and

therefore, institutions were created in order to recall those socially established solution

patterns and pass on to younger generations through the medium of instruction. These

patterns form the body of “educational knowledge” and institutions, then, serve the

purpose of what the authors call accelerated learning:

“Instead of waiting until a problem arises in the lives or minds of the students, motivating them to find a solution (and possibly reinventing the wheel, as it were), the problem is presented to them in the shape of an “Aufgabe” (intellectual problem or task) and they are then expected to remember the existing solution/answer or to try and solve it themselves and thereby learn”. (Dalton-Puffer, 2007: 17)


From this idea Ehlich and Rehbein derive their first maxim, that is, in school

time must be used effectively. Nevertheless, the fact that institutionalized education

offers students solutions for something that has not been experienced as a problem drew

criticism. Modern pedagogy tries to find a balance promoting an autonomous learning

rather than a passive process of transmission of information. This gives us their second

maxim: “Students should acquire knowledge actively and autonomously” (Ehlich and

Rehbein, 1986).

Using time effectively seems to be in opposition to this second maxim.

Autonomous learning is not considered to be scheduled; however, the authors remark

that this discrepancy is responsible for the dominance of the Initiation-Response-

Feedback (IRF from now on) pattern in the classroom interaction. In order to create a

situation with a problem to be solved, teachers do not present the problem-solution

combo in a lecture, but they use the Initiation move (question) as a way to promote

students’ participation. Hence, learners would not acquire knowledge by means of a

passive mechanism but they would infer, with the teachers’ guidance and the connection

of old and new concepts (scaffolding), how to resolve the task/problem they face at. As

Dalton-Puffer points out:

“These questions [Initiation moves] are considered to activate the students´ existing reservoir of knowledge, and thus lead to active learning through forging connections between “old” and “new” knowledge” (2007: 18).

The massive presence of IRF teaching cycles in the CLIL data also supports this

argument. Whole-class interaction based on these IRF-sequences constitutes the focus

of the present study and will be discussed in the following sections.

3.1 The classroom as a structured experience.

Classrooms are complex scenarios where numerous participants interact,

different lines of action proceed and different things happen simultaneously. In the

following diagram Ehlich and Rehbein (1986) illustrates this complexity by showing a

general structure of classroom discourse:


Figure 3.1 A general structure of classroom discourse.

The main discourse is definitely in the hand of the teacher who controls the topic

and turn exchange; whereas the parallel discourse is controlled by the students. If they

are still working on the task and they ask for clarification of a word or concept, for

example, then they are conducting an accompanying talk. Alternatively, students may

decide to discuss personal concerns or other matters related to something completely

different to the content of the lesson, so they maintain a side talk. Being mostly equated

with “classroom discourse” as such and also controlled by the teacher, the present study

will focus on the main discourse.

Within this frame it is useful to consider an additional level of analysis that takes

into account the goal of the exchange. What we are referring to is the differentiation

between a talk with instructional purposes or a talk designed to organize and control

learning and instruction. According to Christie (2000), there is a clear distinction

between instructional and regulative register, as it is shown in Table 3.1:

Classroom Discourse

Main Discourse Parallel Discourse

Accompanying talk Side Talk


Classroom registers

Regulative Management: Pedagogic directions, goals, sequence.

Initial or transitional stages.

Mostly monologic

Instructional Content and its specialized skills. Whole lesson. Mostly dialogic

Table 3.1 Functional orientations in classroom discourse.

Thus, the pedagogic discourse found in school is realized primarily in a

regulative register that deals with the overall pedagogic directions taken, their goals,

pacing and sequencing; and an instructional register that has to do with the content and

its specialized skills at issue. Regulative talk normally occurs at initial or transitional

stages of the lesson, whereas instructional talk can be said to be embedded in it (Christie

2002: 24, 25). Moreover, regulative register is mostly monologic in nature and students’

interruptions are not normally allowed; and instructional talk, on the other hand, is of a

dialogic nature and students’ contributions are invited and essential. Our intention is to

delve into these dialogues of the instructional talk where I-R-F exchanges frequently

emerge.

3.2 Whole class interaction and the IRF cycle.

Each type of instructional talk can be considered as a sub-script which forms

part of the general macrogenre of the pedagogical discourse (Christie, 2000). Different

activity structures take place in these sub-routines developed during the main lesson as

it is shown in Figure 3.3; however, there is one that dominates the CLIL corpus overall:

whole class interaction.


Figure 3.3 Principal activity types in the instructional register (cf.Hatch 1992, 93)

Whole class interaction consists of the teacher conducting a dialogue with the

class as a collective conversational partner. Generally the study of classroom discourse

has concentrated on this type of activity and its marked I-R-F structure. Its dominance

certainly has an impact on learner´s production and, as Dalton-Puffer (2007)

emphasizes, its frequency may also be a result of teacher’s convenience:

“Teachers feel safer with whole class interaction since it is under their control without being stigmatized in the same way as “lecturing” (Teacher Monologue) is. They therefore decided against other activity types, at least in those lessons where the researcher was present”. (Dalton-Puffer, 2007: 32)

After Bellack et al (1966) had coined the term “teaching cycle” (I-R-F), Sinclair

and Coulthard (1975) were the first to conduct a detailed analysis of naturally occurring

classroom talk. They developed a model of classroom discourse involving a series of

ranks and levels arranged in hierarchical order. Ranks at the discourse level, for

example, were, in descending order:

Group work

(teacher led)

Teacher

monologue

Student

monologue

Whole-class

interaction

Individual

seat work

Group work

(student-led)

Instructional

register


While the whole structure was important to the overall model adopted, Sinclair

and Coulthard scheme was most influential at the level of Move. Particularly, the

structure of one of the Moves had great relevance which makes up the “Teaching

Exchange”: the so-called Initiation, Response, Feedback move, that is, the IRF, or

sometimes, following a similar description in Mehan´s (1979) work as the Initiation,

Response, Evaluation move, the IRE. Dalton-Puffer (2007) describes in Table 3.2 the

sequence by adding the classes of acts that correspond to each of the moves:

Opening Move (I) Answering Move (R) Following-up Move (F)

Classes of act

Marker, starter, elicitation, directive, informative, check, prompt, clue, nomination.

Acknowledge, reply, react, comment.

Accept, evaluate, comment.

Table 3.2 The structure of the Teaching Exchange (Dalton-Puffer, 2007: 34)

The following extract illustrates how this IRF cycle is realized in the CLIL

classroom interaction:

I 1 T all right. why were sons preferred?....ahm…Astrid.

R 2 S1 that they could provide the future citizens and soldiers.

F+I 3 T okay.ah now two more reasons ((laughs))…Mario?

R 4 S2 äh to support the parents when they are…old.

F+I 5 T Yes. and the third reason?....a-ah Verena.

Lesson

Transaction

Exchange

Move

Act

Figure 3.4 Rank scale in pedagogical discourse (Sinclair and Coulthard, 1975)


R 6 S3 to inherit a property off…the parents.

F+I 7 T yess….to inherit the property…right..aahm…((continues with other

subtopic))

Extract 3.1 Triadic Dialogue, History, grade 11 (Dalton Puffer, 2000: 35)

By means of the Initiation move the teacher introduces a topic and asks students

for a contribution. Students responses are normally evaluated as relevant (as in turn 3,

5) or not. It is equally possible to find feedback in a form of a statement/repetition often

followed by an opening move (turn 5). Moreover, the follow-up move can also serve to

develop the material presented in the student response so that it becomes quite useful

for the purpose of the lesson promoting participation and understanding (turns 7).

It is interesting to remark that while Sinclair and Coulthard’s system has

certainly been successful in putting the I-R-F sequence on the map, it leaves little space

to other modes but the linguistic one to enhance communication in the classroom. The

fact that teachers combine a verbal and gestural system for presenting and constructing

meanings opens a new area of analysis that is essential in CLIL classroom interaction,

as in turn 3 in extract 3.2:

I 1 TCH do you know anything about Istanbul….anything about Istanbul. Astra

R 2 S (xx) two continents. F+I 3 TCH Yes Istanbul belongs to two continents this is the European part and

this is the ((points to a map on the wall)) R 4 S As= RSupp 5 TCH =part of= R 6 S =asia= F+I 7 TCH =asia yes okay there is a famous street between these two parts a

famous street amir Extract 3.2 Triadic Dialogue, Geography, grade 6. (Dalton Puffer, 2000: 35)

Within this multimodal scenario, the I-slot and F-slot are reserved for the teacher

and the R-slot for the learners. According to some researchers, this is one of the reasons

why students’ opportunities for participation in these classroom activities are limited.

This idea of restriction in the Triadic Dialogue (IRF) can find counterarguments.

Dalton-Puffer, for instance, grants instructional talk and the IRF structure a more


constructive role in the creation of educational knowledge. These are her lines of

argumentation:

“One is to see the instructional talk from an essential game-theoretical perspective (e.g. Ehlich and Rehbein 1986; Appel, 2003), the other is to consider the IRF structure an organic element in a constructivist view of education. What both perspectives have in common is the notion that it is neither desirable nor appropriate to measure instructional talk against a base line of ‘informal conversation’” (2007:73)

The idea of interaction as a “verbal game” is present in Ehlich and Rehbein’s

(1986) analysis of the IRF sequence. They found great similarities between the genre of

riddle and the Triadic Dialogue. On the one hand, there are two main participants,

questioner and questioned, who interact for the sake of a solution. On the other, there is

also a speaker and possessor of the solution; and a hearer who seeks for a right answer

to the crossroads. In the end the solution is imparted, often resulting in a positive

emotive reaction on the part of the hearer. Ehlich and Rehbein’s research shows that

children tend to feel motivated and attracted to participate in this kind of knowledge

game (1986; 35; cf. extract 3.3 below). In the same way, learners may achieve

knowledge as a treasure is found after a long search. What they need is somebody to

guide them along the way, where not only words are necessary:

Mother: Right, now – what do you think the next instruction is because that’s what I,ve got to do?

Child: Put it in the baking tin. Mother: Yes. Well, first of all we’ve got to grease it though –why, do you think? Why

do you grease it Tommy? Child: so the pastry doesn´t stick. Mother: Right. Extract 3.3 Cooking (mother and child (4ys) cooking together) (Stubbs 1983, 123)

Verbal –and also gestural- exchanges between teacher and students, as in

Extracts 3.1, 3.2, show that effective teaching is not simply the transmission of

information from one individual to another, but a collaborative process where

knowledge is constructed between individuals. This constructivist idea of learning is

connected to the second line of argumentation that considers IRF or “Triadic Dialogue”

(TD) (Lemke, 1990) as a means of enhancing teacher-student interaction where

understanding and knowledge are jointly built, and where learners are guided into the


broader understandings and language of the curriculum and the particular subject

discipline (Gibbons, 2002). This technique is called scaffolding.

3.3 The role of interaction in second language learning.

To considerable extent, contemporary thinking and research about interaction

have emphasized its role as a “provider of input” to learners (cf. Gass, 1997). This focus

has its origin in Krashen’s (1988) comprehensible input hypothesis. The learner

improves and progresses along the 'natural order' when he/she receives second language

'input' that is one step beyond his/her current stage of linguistic competence. Since not

all of the learners can be at the same level of linguistic competence at the same time,

Krashen suggests that natural communicative input is the key to designing a syllabus,

ensuring in this way that each learner will receive some 'i + 1' input that is appropriate

for his/her current stage of linguistic competence. Input, it is argued, can be made

comprehensible in a number of ways. Long, in the early 1980s (cf. 1981, 1983),

proposed that input becomes comprehensible “through the speech modifications of

native speakers addressing non-native speakers of the target language” (1983:126).

However, he also added that these alterations are not enough and that modifications of

the interactional structure of conversation are more important for achieving input’s

comprehensibility. He called it Interaction Hypothesis:

“While understanding may indeed be facilitated by encoding in shorter, syntactically less complex utterances, speech modifications alone are rarely sufficient. Native speakers also make a lot of adjustments to the interactional structure of conversation, and it is modifications of the latter sort that are greater, more consistently observed, and probably more important for providing comprehensible input.” (Long 1983: 126,127)

As Pica (1994) points out, all these adjustments that occur when learners and

their interlocutors anticipate, perceive, or experience difficulties in message

comprehensibility has been referred to as Negotiation. Through negotiation,

interlocutors repeat and rephrase for their conversational partners which leads into

comprehensibility.

It is through “collaboration” in highly contextualized activities that language

learning may occur (Swain, 1995). Moreover, different sociocultural studies


demonstrate that collaboration with a more knowledgeable individual during problem

solving often results in a cognitive development of the novice (Donato, 1994; Wells,

1996, 1999). The main premise of a sociocultural theory of the mind is that cognitive

functions such as memory, attention or critical thinking are mediated mental activities,

whose source are activities external to the learner but in which she or he participates.

Through a process of internalization these external activities becomes mental ones. As

Stetsenko and Arievitch (1997:161) point out: “psychological processes emerge first in

collective behavior, in co-operation with the other people, and only subsequently

become internalized as the individual’s own “possessions”. This process is mediated by

semiotic tools. Language is the primary semiotic tool used to guide novices to perform

what they cannot perform on their own (Vygotsky, 1978). According to Vygotsky,

questions are one example of symbolic linguistic tools that semiotically mediate, assist,

and scaffold mental activity during instructional activity. Since language and gesture

represents a single underlying process of presenting meaning (McNeill, 1992), in this

study not only questions, but also gestures and the combination of questions and

gestures, are viewed as one form of assistance/mediation that arise in dialogue between

experts and novices in the context of the CLIL classroom.

4. THE CLASSROOM AS A MULTIMODAL SPACE

4.1 Semiotic modes: Visuals.

One of the most important features of the classroom setting has to do with its

multimodal characteristics. Whenever we take part of this scenario, different modes

operate and different meanings are transmitted. It is quite demonstrated nowadays that

language cannot fully represent all the meanings the addresser wants to encode and

communicate. In this sense, linguistics convey part of the meaning that is

complemented by other semiotic resources on some occasions, and on others, those

semiotic tools even “take on tasks that were not and perhaps cannot be performed by

language” (Kress, 2001: 337). Hence, visuals seem to be in a L2 class a main source of

information and a great support for teachers in the construction and development of


strategies, and for students who will profit from an increment of input which facilitates

their understanding and production of the L2.

When we talk about visuals that may accompany verbal communication in the

classroom we have to distinguish between the actual images, the visual display we use

when we are interacting, that is, pictures, photographs, graphs, tables, realia; and

gestures that exhibit images. These ones belong, not to the outside world, but to the

inside one of memory, thought, and mental images. Gesture images are complex,

intricately interconnected, and not at all like actual images. They cooperate with speech

to express the person’s meaning. A conception of language and gesture as a single

integrated system is sharply different from the notion of body language – a

communication process separate from normal language –. The focus of this study is

mostly on the spontaneous and idiosyncratic gestures that occur while one speaks. But

it is useful to begin setting the stage and present an ordering of gestures as described by

Adam Kendon in 1988 (see Figure 3.1).

Figure 4.1 Kendon’s Continuum (McNeill 1992).

As we move along Kendon’s Continuum (McNeill, 1992), two kinds of

reciprocal changes occur: first, the degree to which speech is an obligatory

accompaniment of gestures decreases from gesticulation to signs. Second, the degree to

which gesture shows the properties of a language increases:

(a) Gesticulation: we said that refers to spontaneous and idiosyncratic

movements of the hands and arms (also head) accompanying speech. It is by far the

most frequent type of gesture in daily use.

Gesticulation Language-like Emblems Pantomimes Signs


(b) Language-like gestures: are parts of sentences themselves. Such gestures

occupy a grammatical slot in a sentence.

(c) Emblems: are conventionalized signs, such as thumbs-up for Ok.

(d) Pantomime: is dumb show, a gesture or sequence of gestures conveying

narrative line, with a story to tell, produced without speech.

(e) Signs: are lexical words in a sign language. They have their own linguistic

structures, including grammatical patterns, stores of words, morphological patterns, etc.

As we have mentioned before we will refer to the leftmost, gesticulation end of

the spectrum, and also take into account the properties of emblems in the teacher-student

interaction.

4.1.1. Gestures.

Gestures are closely linked to speech in a form fundamentally different from that

of speech. That is, speech and gestures are elements of a single integrated process of

utterance formation in which there is a synthesis of opposite modes of thought –global-

synthetic and instantaneous imagery with the linear-segmented temporally extended

verbalization. Following this idea, we have come up with three main characteristics of

gestures in relation to the impact on the CLIL classroom: integration, immediacy and

imagery:

First, we deal with integration. Gestures, despite their differences with speech on

the fact that they are multidimensional and present meaning complexes without

undergoing segmentation or linearization, they occur only during speech. Moreover,

gestures that accompany utterances also present the same or closely related meanings

semantically and perform the same functions pragmatically. For example, iconics

accompany utterances that depict concrete objects and events and fulfil an

ideational/narrative function; whereas metaphorics accompany utterances that refer to

the pragmatic function of the discourse as a whole. Finally, both modes work in


synchrony which implies that the speaker/teacher is presenting the same meaning in

both channels at once.

Second, gestures are immediate. The message that it is sent visually does not

need time to be received. It requires so little energy in order to work, and it does it so

quickly, that allows our minds to get and retain an infinite number of information units

for a fraction of a second.

Finally, as concerns imagery, gestures create (mental) images which are

generally more precise in triggering a wide range of associations, enhancing creative

thinking and memory; they “activate not only the mind but also the emotional side of

the learner” (Cuadrado et al 1999).

4.1.2 McNeill’s typology of gestures.

Figure 4.2 shows the taxonomy of gestures that it is used in this study (McNeill

1985). It has been divided into two major categories: imagistic and non imagistic

gestures depending on their level of concreteness and their capacity to convey imagery.

Each of the gestures has its own properties:

Figure 4.2 McNeill’s taxonomy (1985)

Gestures

Imagistic Non imagistic

Iconics Metaphorics Deictic Interactives Beats


(a) Iconic: it refers to such gestures that present images of concrete entities

and/or actions. They are closely link to the semantic content of the talk. It illustrates

what it is being said. They can be kinetographic, representing some bodily action. Or

pictographic, representing the actual form of the object.

(b) Metaphoric: gestures can also present images of the abstract. There is an

iconic component -the form of the gesture resembles holding an object- and a

metaphoric component -holding or present something is a metaphor for presenting a

meaning-. It also involves the metaphoric use of the space. They can also be

kinetographic or pictographic.

(c) Deictic: although the prototypical deictic gesture is the hand with an

extended index finger, almost any extensible body part or held object can be used for

pointing. Here I made a distinction between the ones that accompany any other visual

element (images or objects) or abstract pointing (species of metaphoric gesture) -and in

this case they will be considered as imagistic-, and the pointing movements that have to

do normally with classroom management (talking turns) called “interactive gestures”.

(d) Beat: They are movements that do not represent a discernible meaning. They

took the form of the hand beating tone. It is the equivalent use of a yellow highlighter

on a written text. It is used to emphasize.

5. SCAFFOLDING IN THE CLIL CLASSROOM.

5.1 Definition

The term scaffolding can be situated in the socio-cognitive psychological frame

developed out of the work of Vygotsky (see, for example, Edwards and Mercer, 1987;

Cazden, 1988; Wells 2000; Hammond and Gibbons, 2005). He considered that “there is

a close relationship between the use of language as a cultural tool in social interaction

and the use of language as a psychological tool providing the resources for individual

thinking” (Gibbons, 2006:21). That is, language is situated in the centre of learning


process by which cognitive strategies developed via the social and the psychological

plane.

From a sociocultural perspective learning is seen as situated within certain forms

of social co-participation (Lave and Wegner, 1991). Lang and Wegner demonstrate that

learners, working individually, do not acquire a body of knowledge that can be applied

to real context, but achieve a series of skills to perform by participating and cooperating

within a social context. This participation is initially limited, dominated by the “expert”

who takes the major responsibility in the complexion of task, and including a short

intervention on the “novice’s” side. Nevertheless, the situation is progressively being

changed when the learner becomes more and more proficient. In order for the learner to

attain a considerable degree of autonomy the teacher will mediate and guide him/her

along the process of acquisition.

The construct of mediation is central to sociocultural theory of Vygotsky (1986;

Lantolf, 2000) and to the study of collaborative interaction. He believes that “human

activities and mental functioning are mediated and facilitated by tools, cultural

practices, and artifacts, the most extensive tool being language” (Gibbons, 2003:248).

Therefore, mediation is a familiar concept in social contexts as law or, in this case,

classrooms. It can be described as occurring in situations characterized by difference,

difficulty, or social distance. The site where social forms of mediation develop is the

ZPD (Zone of Proximal Development) (Vygostsky, 1978). It refers to the cognitive gap

between what learners can do without help and what they can perform in collaboration

with others. According to Vygotsky,

“Learning occurs through this assisted performance and the context of joint activity: Human development, including language development, is thus intrinsically a social process and, in the broadest sense, educational” (Gibbons, 2003: 249).

If we situate in the CLIL context, there is evidence of teacher acting as a

mediator helping learners to “construct events in terms they understand (Webster et al,

1996) by means of using their personal experiences to make sense of a broader

phenomena” (Gibbons, 2002:174). An important feature of this performance is that it


involves not simply helping to do but helping to know how to do (Brooks, 1992;

Maybin, Mercer, & Stierer, 1992; Mercer, 1994; Wells, 1999).

The term scaffolding has been used by educators to describe the nature of this

assisted performance that students need. This metaphor was originally used by Wood,

Bruner and Ross (1976) in their examination of parental tutoring in the early years. In

the classroom it can be defined as “the temporary, but essential, assistance which helps

apprentice learners into new skills, concepts or levels of understanding” (Maybin el al,

1992:186). Therefore, in order to define an action as scaffolding, there should be

evidence of the learner successfully completing the task with the teacher’s help, and

evidence of greater level of independence on the students’ side due to this process.

There is always a connection between the new and the old concepts. In other words, the

learning needs to be located in students’ previous experiences, so they can understand

what they have learned and what they will learn so far, and most importantly, they will

acquire those concepts and make them become part of their own experiences.

Recently, Hammons and Gibbons (2005) designed a model due to a keen interest

in the recognition of scaffolding in the unfolding of classroom interactions. During their

research they also studied ways of identifying those moments when the strategy could

be distinguishable from “good teaching”. Based on the analysis of data they concluded

that “effective teaching” had to do with a combination of teacher’s abilities to plan tasks

and his/her capacity of exploiting the teachable moment:

“The hallmark of effective teaching lies both in teacher´s abilities to plan, select and sequence tasks in their programs in ways that take account of different levels and abilities of specific groups of students, and in their ability to make the most of the teachable moment: that is scaffolding is located at both macro and micro levels. It is this combination of the pre-planned and the contingent that enables teachers to provide new learning challenges for their students, while at the same time providing necessary support for meeting those challenges” (Hammond & Gibbons, 2005: 10)

Thus, in the model of scaffolding they borrowed the notion of networks from

Systemic Linguistics (Halliday, 1994) to tease out features that teachers may choose to

include at both macro o micro level of teaching. The notion of macro-scaffolding refers

to features that deal with classroom goals and its organization, and selection and

sequencing of tasks; that is, it is consciously planned by teachers. The micro level, on


the other hand, has to do with the interactional setting. Teachers interacted with students

contingently in response to the teaching and learning opportunities that presented

themselves. Such interactions are not pre-planned and, what it is more important to us,

“it [is] through such interactions that intellectual challenge and support were realized as

students engaged with demanding curriculum tasks” (Hammond &Gibbons, 2005:20).

Since this study focuses on teacher-student interaction in whole-classroom discourse,

the following sections will concentrate only on the micro-level of scaffolding (shown in

Table 5.1).

SCAFFOLDING

Figure 5.1 Scaffolding in action (Hammond & Gibbons, 2005: 28)

5. 2 Scaffolding Functions

Other studies on scaffolding influence this research. Wood, Bruner and Ross

(1976) examined the nature of tutorial process and its role in problem solving and skill

acquisition. They considered their observations not as a test of a hypothesis about the

tutoring process, but attempts at systematic descriptions of how children respond to

different forms of aids. The corresponding results led them to elaborate a list of six

functions of tutoring or scaffolding:

Designed-in

MACRO-LEVEL

Interactional contingent

MICRO-LEVEL

Linking to prior experience, pointing forward Recapping/meta comment Appropiating Recasting Cued elicitation Increasing prospectiveness θ

Stop

Choose over


1. Recruitment (R): The tutor’s first task is to get the novice’s attention to the

task. In the present case, it implies getting the students interested and ready to

participate in the interaction.

2. Reduction in degrees of freedom (RDF): This involves simplifying the task.

Therefore, there is a reduction on the input that is needed to solve the problem.

3. Direction maintenance (DM): As learners normally get distracted by other

aspects due to the effort and their limitations on completing the task, the tutor has the

role of keeping them in pursuit of the objective that was suggested.

4. Marking critical features (MCF): A tutor works as a highlighter along the task.

He is in charge of marking certain features of an activity that are relevant. He would

also provide feedback to the learners. It is essential for them to know if they are on the

right or wrong track.

5. Frustration control (FC): During all this process it is essential to decrease the

novice’s stress. According to the authors “there should be some such maxim as

“Problem solving should be less dangerous or stressful with a tutor than without””

(1976: 98).

6. Demonstration (D): The tutor should be the “model” for the learners, and that

implies not only performing in front of the student, but “imitating in idealized form an

attempted solution tried by the tutee” (Wood et al, 1976: 98).

This scaffolding consists essentially of the teacher “controlling” those elements

of the task that are beyond the students’ capacity. Therefore, learners will concentrate

and complete those aspects that are within their range of competence. It is important to

mention that in order for a task to be fulfilled, a process of comprehension should occur

beforehand. That is, “comprehension of the solution must precede production” (Wood,

Bruner and Ross, 1976: 90). It must because without it there cannot be an adequate

feedback. Although we should not ignore the role of serendipity –“the faculty of making


happy and unexpected discoveries by accident” (1976: 90)-, it is within this process of

attempting comprehension where learners develop a “blind” trying-out behavior. Such

behavior requires the support of the teacher who would use different scaffolding tools to

help students to solve the dilemma.

5. 3 Scaffolding Tools.

According to Vygotsky, human social and mental activities are mediated by

tools and signs. Essentially, humans have created tools such as language, mathematics,

music, and art to mediate interaction in the world (Lantolf, 2000). In the current study

not only language, but also gestures working in synchrony, are considered the main

tools involved in the process of scaffolding and in second language learning (CLIL).

The term semiotic mediation refers to the fact that human mind organizes the

world by negotiating the meaning of signs and symbols that appear in a variety of

everyday sociocultural situations (Daniels, Cole, and Wertsch, 2007). Language and

gestures are two of these semiotic systems. By using them, we shape thought and action.

Therefore, language, gestures and thought are interconnected. They are linked in the

sense that gestures and language influence thought, and thought influences language

and gestures. McNeill states that “gestures do not just reflect thought but have an

impact on thought. Gestures, together with language, help constitute thought (1992:

245, emphasis in original). They are two aspects of the same process where gestures

represent the imagistic structure and speech the linguistic structure.

5. 3. 1. Teacher questions in CLIL.

Asking questions is the key to knowledge and in this sense we can consider

questions as our most important tool of the mind (cf. Postman, 1979:140). We are

continuously questioning in our daily life in order to satisfy our thirst for knowledge.

Nevertheless, this is not the case of classroom setting. In formal education students are


aware of “historical” problems and their “established” solutions due to the limited time.

Many studies have criticized teachers for asking too many questions to get information

they already know. However, if we take into account that school education is

accelerated learning and that is essentially based on supra-individual needs and

knowledge wants, then teachers are acting as it should be. In other words,

“Deeply personal, experiential and/or emotional knowledge wants are not the regular case in formal education, so it is necessary to guide individual learners to problem awareness on a cognitive level in order to create a kind of opening or “gap” in which learning can occur” (Dalton-Puffer, 2007: 94)

How teachers use questions during whole-class instruction has generated many

discussions on the nature and the role of this basic tool of interaction (Cazden, 1988;

Chaudron, 1988; Hatch, 1992; Long, 1981; Mehan, 1979; Tharp & Gallimore, 1988;

Wells, 1996). Most of them have focused on identifying question types and taxonomies

(cf. Chaudron, 1988); but also other input-oriented theories of second language

acquisition have investigated how questions –in the form of clarification requests- might

promote the modification of interaction (Long, 1981) and negotiation of meaning. Thus,

it is claimed that questions may be used to achieve higher levels of comprehensible

input to learners (Gass, 1997). They all coincide in the idea that questions are

“[a] fundamental discursive tool for engaging learners in instructional interactions,

checking comprehension, and building understandings of complex concepts” (McCormick &

Donato, 2000:183).

A different perceptive based on the role of students’ output in the classroom

exchange and the design of a task-based learning environments involves the aim of

shifting some of the question-asking from the teacher to the students. What is more, a

re-evaluation of some (display) questions has led to a new view of their function. It is

argued that questions not only monitor state of mind in order to test and evaluate, but

also enable the students to make a contribution to the shared construction of a

proposition which it would not be possible for them without guidance. McCormick and

Donato states that questions “function as dynamic and discursive tool to build

collaboration and to scaffold comprehension and comprehensibility” (2000: 197).

Following this idea, the present study proposes to study classroom questions –as well as


gestures- that tend to reflect their meditational quality; that is, their ability to assist

learning.

5. 3. 2. Teacher gestures in CLIL.

As we cannot perceive gestures as an individual system, but as one aspect of the

same communicative process, it is essential to highlight the fact that speech and

gestures do not occur at the same time. The gesture begins slightly before the spoken

component. It may happen that when the speaker departs from the topic at hand, the

speaker uses gesture as an indication of that departure. Most importantly, some of the

gestures occur when the speaker considers his utterance to be slightly unintelligible to

the listener. The speaker uses a gesture, so the listener can understand the message.

McNeill (1992: 208) states that “a gesture should occur exactly where the information

conveyed is relatively unpredictable, inaccessible, and/or discontinuous”.

If we move to our educational setting, teacher would use gestures where the

information is not being understood by the learner, or when the grammar of an utterance

is more complex. This is where scaffolding takes place. Roth (2001), in his literary

review on the topic of gestures in teaching and learning, included an example of a

physics explanation by a high school student. He discovered that the listener didn´t

understand the message completely only with the verbal component; that is, when no

gestures were used. However, only with the gesture component is the listener able to

understand what it is being communicated.

Going back to the idea that speech and gesture are two aspects of the same

communicative process, if we considered that the teacher modifies his or her speech in

order to achieve comprehension and comprehensibility from students, the same will

happen with gestures that are also altered for an appropriate interpretation of the

message as a whole (verbal and nonverbal). Adams (1998) conducted a study on

foreigner talk in order to determine whether a native speaker of English may modify his

gestures as well as his speech when addressing non-native speakers. The results

indicated an increased frequency of use for deictics and iconics by native speakers.


Qualitative interpretation showed that emblems, metaphorics and pantomime facilitate

comprehension as well.

There were several attempts in the past to study the importance of gestures in L2

classrooms. That is the case of Allen (2000), who observed one female teacher in a

classroom setting. His study deals with a detailed description of the gestures being used

by the tutor. Nevertheless, the essential part focuses on the students’ commentaries.

They all agreed on the “great aid” the teacher’ gesture was for their understanding.

(Allen, 2000:169). More recently, Lazaraton (2004) conducted another study of the

speech and gestures used by a nonnative English as an L2 instructor. In his research he

observed the gestures and non-verbal behavior the teacher used while explaining the

meaning of 18 lexical items. He discovered that the types of gestures applied were, as in

Adam’s work, iconics, emblems, deictics, and beats. Without these gestures it was to

determine the methods by which the instructor was able to convey the word meaning.

Overall the results showed that gestures are an essential scaffolding tool of pedagogy in

L2 classrooms. Lazaraton states that “classroom L2 learners receive considerable input

in nonverbal form that may modify and make verbal input (more) comprehensible”

(2004:111). Moreover, in a collaborative study made by Lazaraton and Ishihara (2005)

with similar characteristics, the teacher also claimed:

“[nonverbal behavior] can certainly be an effective teaching aid that can bolster both teaching and student comprehension, provided that it is used in a pedagogical and culturally appropriate manner. To be effective, nonverbal behavior must be coordinated with the verbal counterpart in a non-obtrusive way, and used to send a consistent message” (p.537).

Being aware of the gestures teachers produced in the classroom involves going

one step further in the field of second language learning. According to Sime (2008), all

of the learners that were under her study reported that gestures were helping in relating

meaning and improve comprehension. And most importantly, gestures were “perceived

as providing scaffolding assistance within the ZPD” (Zone of Proximal Development)

(Sime, 2008: 264), that is, they contributed positively to the process of classroom

interaction.

In the current study we would like to delve into this process of scaffolding with

gestures and questions. Therefore, in the next chapter we would apply one of the six


functions of tutoring elaborated by Wood, Bruner and Ross (1976) in our analysis of the

teacher’s discourse. Our intention is to demonstrate that questions, together with

gestures, are used as essential tools for scaffolding in the L2 classroom. These tools are

modified in order to achieve learners’ comprehension and comprehensibility.

T h e s t u d y | 38

3 The study

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.

The important thing is not to stop questioning.

Albert Einstein-

6. METHODOLOGY.

6.1 Research Questions

This study deals with how CLIL teacher’s questions and gestures together, that

is, verbal and non verbal components, serve to scaffold learning during whole

classroom interaction. Moreover, we want to find out how these questions and gestures

reflect the six functions of scaffolding already discussed in the previous section. For the

purpose of not going too far in the study, we limit the analysis to one specific

scaffolding function that is being observed in teacher’s questions, as well as gestures.

Therefore, we aim at answering these questions:

1) In CLIL classroom interaction, is input being modified in order to facilitate

learners’ understanding?

2) If input is being modified, are gestures and speech semantically and

pragmatically coexpressive?

3) Is there any difference in use of questions and gestures depending on the

pedagogical purposes?


In the following we will discuss in more detail the setting in which the

recordings of the classroom discourse took place. We will also describe the participants

of the interaction: teacher and students, as well as the instruments and the process of

data collection. Finally, a global characterization of the resulting data collection will be

given of the CLIL lessons.

6.2 Pilot study

The Information Network on Education in Europe report (Eurydice 2006)

indicates that Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) has progressively

become one of the most widely educational approaches implemented across Europe. In

this respect, over the last two decades, some autonomous regions in Spain have

successfully started to implement content and language integrated learning (CLIL)

projects in State preprimary, primary and secondary schools (Cenoz, J. 1998; Navés &

Muñoz, 1999; Llinares & Whittaker, 2006). Data used in this study comes from a

research project (ProCLIL) that was investigating various CLIL implementation styles

across Europe (129239-CP-2006-1-CY-Comenious-C21 2006-2683 / 001-001 SO2)

which focused on describing the professional and instructional profile of a number of

pre-primary and primary teachers involved in the bilingual project lead by the

Autonomous Region of Madrid during the last years.

6.2.1 Setting

Although 147 primary schools and more than 300 teaching professionals were

contacted through e-mail questionnaires, personal interviews and group discussions in

the European research project we mentioned before, in the current study the data were

selected from one school in particular. The reason for this selection has to do with the

teacher’s pedagogical practice – content and language learning, model, strategies,

activities, input, expected output and effectiveness –. The results presented here are

based on the analysis of a 1st Primary classroom in Colmenar Viejo, a small town


located in the Autonomous Community of Madrid. Within this course of three hours a

week, contents taught were mainly on science (Conocimiento del Medio) in a CLIL

context; that is, students learn the subject through a second language in their native

country; therefore, the L2 and L1 are used indistinctly in their learning process. In this

school initiatives for teaching content through English were welcome and enjoyed

positive publicity. Furthermore, students attending CLIL classes derived some prestige

and self-satisfaction from that fact as we will see below. Therefore, parents were very

keen to register their children at this centre. At the time of data collection, this school

had set up a CLIL stream three years before.

6.2.2 Class Materials

The text for the course was Essential Science (Richmond-Santillana, 2006)

which is a Primary textbook that teaches the basic concepts of the Natural Science,

Geography and History syllabus through English. The book is part of a collection with

different levels. Each level is carefully graded to allow students to develop their English

language skills whilst learning key Science concepts. According to the teacher, she

doesn’t use it very much but parents prefer to have something written down. To

supplement the text and add variety to the resources used in class, the teacher

introduced materials she created based mainly on flashcards, posters, etc. including

storytelling, songs and phonetics. The study of the English sounds was carried out using

the Phonetics International (PI)1, an organized and flexible synthetic phonics program.

In this case, although coming from England, the teacher adapted the worksheets to the

Spanish writing. The program was complemented by Jolly Phonics2, a fun and child

centered approach to teaching literacy through synthetic phonics as well.

1 For more information, please see http://www.phonicsinternational.com/index.html 2 For more information about this approach, see http://jollylearning.co.uk/overview-about-jolly-phonics/


6.2.3 Participants

The instructor, a native Spanish-speaking female, had earned a degree on

Primary Education, and completed her educational background with many courses on

CLIL methodology. At the time of the recording, she had been working as a teacher for

13 years. She was the one in charge of the CLIL program and showed a lot of initiative

and motivation. As she pointed out in an interview: “My parents paid a lot of money on

my bilingual education, I don't see why families with less means cannot have the same

opportunity”. As we mentioned before, the class was entirely taught in L2, and for that

purpose, the teacher had the support from an English Assistant who helped her in class

two hours a week.

Her twenty students from 1st Primary were also Spanish native speakers. All of

them were six years old at the time of data collection. They participated actively in

CLIL classroom discourse as they were strongly motivated. At the beginning of the data

collection, learners looked tense but they worked very well in the interaction. They used

a bit of L1 in pair-work. However, in whole class interaction they spoke English as they

seemed to have a good command on English (CLIL) vocabulary. Furthermore, some of

them used other L2 different from English at home. They loved playing with the teacher

and mates, and showed a high level of comprehension of the L2 –lower than level of

production-. In content lessons, students understood the concepts quite easily and

developed a variety of strategies, such as writing small charts with the essential

information. They all belonged to a medium social class with no problems of

integration. The class was considered as advanced by school and teachers.

6.2.4 Data Collection

A variety of data collection techniques were used in this study. The researcher

interviewed the teacher before and after each recording. The topic of the conversation

was about teacher’s understanding of CLIL, skill goals for the course (i.e. grammar,

vocabulary acquisition, listening comprehension, pronunciation, culture) and her

methodology for achieving these goals. In addition to the interview, 15 1-hour classes


were videotaped between January and May 2008. These recordings were part of the

ProCLIL corpus which at that moment had videotaped 4 schools, and it consisted of 67

1-hour CLIL classroom sessions. Recording equipment was introduced after an initial

visit to present the project and to observe the class. The researcher recorded the teacher-

students interactions by means of a camera located in one corner of the classroom in

order to go unnoticed by the participants. During the taping, field notes were taken to

record all occurrences of teacher-fronted activities and when in the lesson occurred,

information written on the board, speakers, and occasions on specific teacher-student

questioning and gestural segments and when in the lesson they occurred. The final data

collection technique used was a questionnaire for the teacher, which contained open and

closed questions. It was divided into seven sections asking about school, the teacher’s

experience on CLIL, the specific training received on CLIL, the content subjects, the

materials used in class, the teacher’s practice on CLIL, and the benefits and drawbacks

found in this approach (see Appendix A).

In sum, the data collection techniques employed in this study were interviews,

verbal reports, field notes, videotaping and questionnaires. The interviews, verbal

reports, field notes and questionnaires were the sources of data on the teacher’s CLIL

methodology. The videotapes provided data of the teacher’s use of questions and

gestures.

6.2.5 Classroom Data

After viewing the 15 videotapes, Videotapes 1 and 3 were selected for analysis

because they were found to be the most representative of the recurring routines of the

course. They were about the same topic: food and plants, so we could see the process of

vocabulary acquisition as well. The first lesson was theoretical, whereas the second was

a review of the contents they had seen the previous day. They also contained an

adequate number of teacher-fronted presentations for analysis. From the two videotapes,

the classroom data were reduced to whole class interactions and their I-R-F structures

(Sinclair and Coulthard, 1975). These segments were then displayed (i.e., transcribed)


and indexed. Teacher-fronted activities, rather than group work, were chosen as a

context frame for examining teacher questions and gestures because it has been

documented that teacher use questions and gestures frequently as a scaffolding tool

when interacting with the entire class (Alibali and Nathan, 2005, McCormick and

Donato, 2000, Hatch 1992).

For the purpose of analysis 8 teacher-fronted segments were identified. Indexing

the data included noting information about the context and content of each activity.

Transcription methodology included identifying speakers, indicating the I-R-F moves

and describing non verbal behavior. In 51 minutes of segments recording, 378 teacher

turns were identified. 209 of them were turns with interrogatives. A total of 241 teacher

interrogatives were identified, which includes catenative interrogatives. They refer,

according to Romero and Llinares (2001: 33), to “a series of interrogatives in the same

turn, some of which have contextualized purposes”. We also found 50 teacher turns

with elicitations, although it was not the focus of this study. On the other hand, we

marked 211 teacher turns with gestures. Moreover, a total of 360 gestures were used by

the teacher and classified into different categories: iconics, metaphorics, deictics and

beats.

After the questions and gestures were identified, they were coded for one

specific scaffolding function; that is, Reduction in Degrees of Freedom (henceforth

RDF), from McCormick and Donato’s taxonomy (2000). This decision was taken as we

considered this scaffolding function to be significantly relevant in a CLIL primary

classroom. It has to do with simplifying the task demands which in a content and

language integrated learning approach is of key importance, especially when addressing

young learners. However, a complete analysis of all the six scaffolding functions is in

mind for further research.

Therefore, a total of 134 RDF scaffolding functions were identified in the data.

5 of them were RDF questions, 41 were RDF gestures and/or visuals, and a total of 88

consisted of a mixture of RDF questions and gestures. In the following section we will

examine these questions and gestures closely, for the purpose of answering the

hypotheses raised at the beginning of Part I. We will describe how they portrayed in the


data and the effects they both had in the process of students’ comprehension and

comprehensibility.

7. RESULTS

The findings are explained in reference to RDF scaffolding function and the

research questions.

7.1 In CLIL classroom interaction, is input being modified in order to

facilitate learners’ understanding?

The instructor used input to teach content of social sciences in a CLIL lesson by

means of scaffolding strategies. As we mentioned in previous sections, in this study we

analyzed the RDF scaffolding function following McCormick and Donato (2000).

The analysis of teacher discourse in Table 7.1 shows that 134 teacher turns

performed the RDF scaffolding function. This means that 51 % of the scaffolding

strategies had to do with RDF function, and the other 49% was divided into the other

five functions. Knowing that RDF function deals with changing the input, we can see

that there was an important quantity of turns being modified.

1st class: theory 2nd class: review Total

RDF function 65 69 134

RDF questions 4 8 12

RDF gestures

13 17 30

RDF questions and gestures together.

48 41 89

Table 7.1 Distribution of the RDF function in two CLIL classroom segments.


In the following extract we can see how this strategy takes place:

I 1 TCH: We have to think of things in common. (silence) R 2 CH: No answer. I 3 TCH: Any idea? (silence)

R 4 CH: No answer. I 5 TCH: Move your brains. Anything in common between animals and plants?

R 6 CH: No answer. I

7

TCH: OK, I’m going to give you a clue. When you go to the supermarket to do your shopping … for the week, do you buy plants to eat? Do you buy animals to eat? (RDF Question) (RDF Gesture) 2 iconic gestures: (a) right hand with her fingers together like picking something. (b) Moving downwards and taking the hand to her moth (eating). Right hand moving to her mouth again, the same gesture. Nodding Head.

R 8 CH: [Yes] F,I

9

TCH: So animals and plants, we eat them (writes this last sentence on board in the 'Animals and plants' circle). What else do we do with them?

R 10 CH: No answer. I 11 TCH: What else do we do with animals and plants?

R 12 CH: %L1 El cerdo L1% F,I 13 TCH: Yes, but what do we do with them? R 14 CH: Eating.

Figure 7.1 (a) Iconic gesture 19:59min (30/01/2008 1st part of the recording)

Figure 7.2 (b) Iconic gesture 19:60min. (30/01/2008 1st part of the recording)


F,I 15 TCH: We eat them. Is here. Do we use them for anything else? R 16 CH: %L1 Los coges para decorar L1% F

17

TCH: What? Plants? OK. We decorate and we can also decorate with animals. We decorate with them (writes it on board).

I

18

CH: (A pupil interrupts to remind the teacher of a jolly phonic song) Carmen, %L1 Mi padre cuando gira L1% (related to a sound in a word the teacher has just used. /d/ in 'decorate', but it is the /th/ sound in ‘father’; the child is confusing /d/ with it. T. is pleased that the child remembers)

R,F,I

19

TCH: Oh, yes the Jolly Phonics that we learned yesterday. You remember the sign (gesture) ...Ok, what else?


21

TCH: Ok, look at the tables and the chairs. What are they made of? Are they made of a plant? (RDF Question) (RDF Gesture) Deictic-Beat-Beat (a) pointing with her right finger at the classroom furniture. (b) Both palms opened and moving forward, separated from the body.

R 22 CH: No F,I 23 TCH: No?

Figure 7.3 (a) Deitic gesture 21:20min. (30/01/2008 1st part of the recording)

Figure 7.4 (b) Beat gesture 21:24 min (30/01/2008 1st part of the recording)


R 24 CH: % L1 ¡La madera de los árboles! L1% F

25

TCH: OK, Giovanni. Thank you. They are made out of trees. So we build with them. We build things out of them (writes). But this is only plants. (T.puts an arrow pointing at the plants circle.)

I

26

G: %L1 Era tan fácil como un %x…x%...¿De qué está la madera? De madera, hijo L1%

3Extract 7.1 Triadic Dialogue in CLIL, Science, 1st Primary (1st lesson).

The instructor worked as a mediator and used two RDR questions to minimize

students’ effort when trying to get the information that was required. When no student

answer was forthcoming as in turn 7, the teacher followed up the initial, more complex

question –open question- with a less complex one –yes/no question-, repeating the step

until an answer was offered. She also contextualized the question in a familiar setting –

the supermarket-, and speech is supported by gestures. RDF question is performed

together with a RDF gesture. In this case, the word “eating” is complemented by the

iconic gesture that represents the action in students’ L1 conceptual/gestural world. In

turn 21, the deictic gesture of pointing at the classroom furniture was used as a reference

for learners and a support for speech.

7.2 If input is being modified, are gestures and speech semantically and

pragmatically co-expressive?

Results show that 9% of the RDF function was accomplished only by questions,

23% by gestures; and finally a 68% combining the two: questions and gestures.

According to Figure 7.5 the RDF function can be performed by three different tools:

questions, gestures (also visuals) or finally using both modes of communication. Hence,

than half of the episodes analyzed had to do with the teacher presenting contents in

verbal and non-verbal communication simultaneously, followed by the use of gestures,

and only a small percentage of questions in isolation.

3 The extracts we will show to illustrate the results only describe RDF questions and gestures. Therefore, questions and gestures that don´t accomplish this scaffolding function have been excluded in the samples. Transcription code can be found in Appendix B.


Figure 7.5 Characterization of the RDF function.

We will now discuss in more detail, and with examples from our data, the

different instances where RDF took place in the I-R-F structure during whole classroom

interaction; that is RDF function with questions, RDF with gestures, and finally the

RDF function with questions and gestures.

1st Instance: RDF function with questions:

In contrast to RDF with gestures or with the combination of the two modes, the

RDF function performed only with questions was limited in the data:

I 1 TCH: Ok, what do we eat? R 2 CH: %L1 lechuga L1% I 3 Assistant: What do we eat? I 4 TCH: Can you sit down? I

5

Assistant: We eat the stem, the flower, the fruit, the leaves or…which one? (RDF mixture)


Gesture: Metaphoric: she uses her fingers. She touches each of the fingers of the right hand (showing the options)

R 6 TCH: The roots

F+I

7

Assistant: Or the roots. Which one? (RDF mixture) Gesture: Metaphoric: she uses her fingers. She moves each of the fingers of the right hand (showing the options)

R 8 CH: No answer. I 9 TCH: What´s this first? ((she has a flashcard)) (RDF question)

R 10 CH: Cauliflower. R 11 CH: %L1 col L1%

F+I 12 TCH: is this a cauliflower? No R 13 CH: [cauliflower] I 14 TCH: what´s this? ((she has a flashcard)) (RDF question)

R 15 CH: [cauliflower] F 16 TCH: No F 17 Assistant: It´s not a cauliflower I 18 TCH: It´s similar

R 19 CH: %L1 x …porque tiene blanco x L1% I 20 TCH: I think it´s a lettuce. %x I think you use it for coleslaw x%

Figure 7.6 Metaphoric gesture 09:52 min (30/01/2008, 2nd part of the recording)



R 21 AD: % x…x% F+I

22

TCH: Ok, it´s a lettuce, but a french one. What do we eat then? ((she has a flashcard)) (RDF question)

R 23 CH: The leaves. F 24 TCH: The leaves.

Extract 7.2 Triadic Dialogue in CLIL, Science, 1st Primary (1st lesson).

RDF with questions, which occurred 12 times in the data, was used to ask about

specific information. In extract 7.2 the information was already presented in a flashcard

(line 9, 14, 22). In the analysis, all questions were supported by visual input (flashcards,

charts, isolated letters; that is, realia). In line 9 and 14, the question was the same -

“What’s this?”-, asking the learners to identify the object that was represented in the

picture, whereas in line 22 the question had to do with a decision. The students were

requested to give the right answer from a set of options that was previously displayed.

2nd Instance: RDF function with gestures:

The teacher’s use of RDF function with gestures is more frequent compared to

questions. RDF gestures occurred 41 times in the data replacing the verbal input:

I 1 TCH: Yes, can you tell me? R 2 CH: The children are quiet. A child says %L1 'la judía' L1%.

F+I

3

TCH: One moment. This is more difficult. It's very, very abstract. We talked about big….. (RDF gestures) Iconic: both hands and arms moving upwards picturing a semi circle.

Figure 7.8 Iconic gesture 12:12 min (30/01/2008, 1st part of the recording)


R 4 CH: Trees. F+I 5 TCH: Trees. More.

R 6 CH: Flower R 7 CH: %L1 ¿Y la palmera? L1% F 8 TCH: No, those are parts of the plant. R 9 CH: Flower

F+I

10

TCH: No…ok, we have a big tree and then we have a smaller… (RDF gestures) 2 Iconic: (a) both hands and arms moving upwards picturing a semicircle and (b) downwards picturing a small semicircle.

R 11 CH: Crunch? F 12 TCH: No R 13 CH: Trees. F 14 TCH: No R 15 CH: Flowers R 16 CH: Bush F 17 TCH: Bush. Fantastic. […]

Extract 7.3 Triadic Dialogue in CLIL, Science, 1st Primary ( 1st lesson).

Figure 7.9 (a) Iconic gesture 12:28 min (30/01/2008, 1st part of the recording)

Figure 7.10 (b) Iconic gesture 12:31 min (30/01/2008, 1st part of the recording)


In this example, the teacher tried to create a chart on plants and animals with

students’ help. It is review on vocabulary and the instructor obtained the words from

learners by using elicitations and gestures. Hence, in lines 3,5,10 RDF gestures were

made as input replacing speech. The type of gesture the instructor used differs

depending on the situation. In line 3 she represented a “tree” with an iconic gesture, so

she drew the object with her hands. In lines 5, 10 she used a new gesture for “bush”;

however, she added a metaphoric nuance in comparing “tree” and “bush” that had to do

with space –the word “tree” was represented in the air with both hands in a high

position, whereas “bush” was depicted with both hands in a lower position-.

From the 30 RDF functions only with gestures, 28 of them appeared with

elicitations where the sentence was unfinished and the visual complemented the verbal

input; in the other 2 cases the gesture –in this case imagistic or iconic- was the only clue

for the right answer. We also observed that in 20 RDF functions with gestures the tutor

used realia linked to gesticulation.

Table 7.2 describes the distribution of teacher´s gestures in this particular RDF

function where no questions are used.

Iconics Deictics (imagistic) Mixture

1st lesson 6 3 4 2nd lesson 2 13 2 Total 8 16 6

Table 7.2 Distribution of the teacher’s RDF gestures.

Figure 7.11 shows that deictic gestures are the most prevalent in the data (53%),

followed by iconics (27%), and a mixture of different gestures (20%). No other gestures

like metaphorics or beats were found in the analysis.


3rd Instance: RDF function with questions and gestures:

Based on data, 68% of the RDF function was performed by gestures and

questions together. Taking into consideration the focus of the study which considers

CLIL classroom as a multimodal scenario, we examined the typology of gestures in first

place. Then we observed the questions that accompanied the gestures in our pursuit for

an answer to the research question of whether gestures and speech are pragmatically co-

expressive.

In Table 7.3 below we have the different gestures used in the RDF functions

accompanied by questions. That is, the number of imagistic and non imagistic gestures

performed in the teacher’s discourse.

Iconics Metaphorics Deitics Beats Mixture

1st lesson 6 6 10 5 20

2nd lesson 3 1 28 0 9

Total 9 7 38 5 29

Table 7.3 Distribution of the teacher’s RDF gestures when accompanied by questions.

Figure 7.11 Distribution of the teacher’s RDF gestures.


Figure 7.12 below also shows that the deictic gesture is the most frequent (43%)

followed by a mixture of gestures (33%), iconics (10%), metaphorics (8%) and finally

non imagistic gestures; that is, beats (6%). Deictic gestures were considered as imagistic

as they were performed with the support of another visual element. The instructor’s use

of charts or flashcards was based on her notion of the progress of the task, or usually,

the lack of progress. When students could not answer the question, the teacher changed

or modified her questions until the students could more actively participate in the

discussion. The manner in which the teacher reduced the degrees of freedom of the task

at hand included asking more specific question or a force-choice question, and adding a

deictic gesture together with realia (i.e., flashcards, chart).

Figure 7.12 Typology of RDF gestures.

The following example is taken from a review activity in which the teacher used

RDF questions and gestures to help students to get the right answer. She tried first not to

use visuals, but she ended up asking students with the support of flashcards.

I 1 TCH: OK. Now. More difficult. (T. rubs off the matching). R 2 CH: More difficult?

F+I

3

TCH: Yes, because now I'm not going to show you any pictures, anything. You just have to use your minds. Are you ready?

R 4 CH: [Yes]


I

5

TCH: José Luis. What do we get from the cow? (RDF question) (RDF gesture) Beat: she opens the mouth. Vocalizing (cow).and she moves the right arm forward highlighting the word.

R 6 CH: No answer I

7

TCH: We get many many products but you only have to tell me one. (RDF Gesture) Iconics: (a) she uses both arms and moves them from left to right in horizontal with palms opened. (illustrating quantity). (b) She shows the index finger and moves it forward.

R 8 CH: No answer.

Figure 7.13 Beat gesture 02:21 min (04/02/2008, 2nd part of the recording)

Figure 7.14 (a) Iconic gesture 02:24 min (04/02/2008, 2nd part of the recording)

Figure 7.15 (b) Iconic gesture 02:26 min (04/02/2008, 2nd part of the recording)


I

9

TCH: You know what a cow is? Remember the cow? (RDF question) (RDF Gesture) Metaphoric: she points with her index right hand finger to her brain.

R 10 CH: No answer I 12 TCH: Yes or no, José Luis? (silence)

R 13 CH: No answer I 14 TCH: Do you remember the cow, José Luis? Yes or no?

R 15 CH: Yes. I 16 TCH: What is a cow? A cow is a mammal.

R 17 CH: %L1 Es un mamífero L1% I 18 TCH: No?

R 19 CH: No answer I 20 TCH: Do you remember a cow, José Luis? What do we get from the cow?

R 21 CH: No answer I 22 TCH: What do we get from the cow? Tell me! (silence. T. looks through her flashcards)

R 23 CH: No answer I 24 TCH: Well, I don't have a cow here. I thought I did. No. No?

R 25 CH: No answer I 26 TCH: Anybody? Gerardo, what do we get from the cow?

R 27 CH: Milk. F+I 28 TCH: Milk, José Luis. From the cow, we get milk! What else?

R 29 CH: Ahhhh (no answer) R 30 CH: %L1 Queso L1%

F+I 31 TCH: Ah, how do you say that in English? R 32 CH: A yogurt! F 33 TCH: Yogurt! R 34 CH: %L1 Y quesito L1% F

I

35

36

TCH: Cheese. Cheese. From the cow (T. shows a cow flashcard), we get cheese, we get milk, we get yogurt. I had a better cow but I don't know where it is. […] TCH: OK. I see that you are not awake today so I'm going to show you some pictures and you are going to tell me which animal or which plant…. [unintelligible]. Ready?

Extract 7.4 Triadic Dialogue in CLIL, Science, 1st Primary (2nd lesson).



During the review the teacher asked one student about the different products we

get from the cow. She was conscious about the difficulty of the exercise, so she warned

the students first. In line 5 she started with an open question. Beginning in line 7, the

teacher scaffolded the task of understanding the question by simplifying the task. The

first subtask was for José to identify what a cow is (line 9). Then the instructor modified

the input with a yes/no question (line 14). As he could answer the question, the teacher

asked another student and finished the strategy by using the flashcards. This extract was

chosen to exemplify how questions, even though modified, needed the visual support.

We will see now how deictics, realia and questions together helped the teacher realize

the goal of comprehension, and facilitate participation:

I

1

TCH: (nods) A little bit. This part of the root. OK? Well, this is an easy one! (carrots flashcard) (RDF question) (RDF gesture) Iconic and Deictic: (a) the teacher points first with her index finger (right hand) to the part of the picture she wants to highlight. (b) Then she uses the two fingers together and brings

Figure 7.17 (a) Deitic gesture 25:49 min (04/02/2008, 1st part of the recording)


Figure 7.19 (c) Deitic gesture 25:51 min (04/02/2008, 1st part of the recording)


them closer to the mouth (eat).(c) Then she points at a specific part of the picture again.

R 2 Rocío: Carrot! (without waiting for T. to say a name) F+I

3

TCH: (she stares at her). OK. Rocío. Carrots. What do we eat from the carrot? The flower? (RDF question) (RDF gesture) Deictic: she points at another part of the drawing again with her index finger (right hand) and she holds the flashcard with her left hand.

R 4 CH: (Rocío shakes her head) F+I

5

TCH: No. The stem? (RDF question) (RDF gesture) Deictic: she points at another part of the drawing again with her index finger (right hand) and she holds the flashcard with her left hand.

R 6 CH: (Rocío shakes her head) F+I

7

TCH: No. The leaves? (RDF question) (RDF gesture) Deictic: she points at another part of the drawing again with her index finger (right hand) and she holds the flashcard with her left hand.

Figure 7.20 Deitic gesture 25:55 min (04/02/2008, 1st part of the recording)




R 8 CH: (R. nods)

I

9

TCH: The leaves? (RDF question) (RDF gesture) Deictic-Iconic: (a) she points at another part of the drawing again with her index finger (right hand) and she holds the flashcard with her left hand. (b) She closes her fingers and brings them closer to her mouth (eat).

R 10 R: Yes. I

11

TCH: Do you eat the leaves? (RDF question) (RDF gesture) Deictic: she points at another part of the drawing again with her index finger (right hand) and she holds the flashcard with her left hand.

R 12 R: No. F+I

13

TCH: No. The roots? (RDF question)

Figure 7.23 (a) Deitic gesture 26:01 min (04/02/2008, 1st part of the recording)




(RDF gesture) Deictic: she points at another part of the drawing again with her index finger (right hand) and she holds the flashcard with her left hand.

R 14 R: Yes. I 15 TCH: Yes. We eat the roots. And what colour are these roots?

Extract 7.5 Triadic Dialogue in CLIL, Science, 1st Primary (2nd lesson).

In extract 7.5 Rocío had an opportunity to participate in the construction of the

answer because the teacher’s use of RDF questions, deictics and realia provided her

with manageable subtasks to perform. In line 1 Rocío had to complete the first subtask

which was to identify the object from the flashcard. Then, in lines 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13 the

instructor modified the input by means of yes/no specific questions, deictics and the

picture. The completion of these subtasks contributed to the full solution of the task. In

this way, we see how the three elements together provide a venue for the learner to

participate in the social setting of the classroom and build new knowledge.

As we have seen questions were quite simple since we were talking of very

young learners. In this respect iconics, also manifested in the data, provide a lifeline to

the input already given by the teacher. Iconics illustrate what it is being said:

I

1

TCH: In the park, in the forest. I think that's enough. OK, and where do plants live? (RDF question)



(RDF gesture) Beats: (a) Several movements with both hands opened. Like a fan. Deictic: (b) Pointing with the marker at the left-hand side of the board.

R 2 CH: Soil. R 3 CH: Sunlight.

F+I

4

TCH: Yes, that's what they need, but where do they live? We said they can live in a greenhouse, in a big field, in a garden. (RDF question)

Figure 7.27 (a) Beat gesture 15:49 min (30/01/2008, 1st part of the recording)

Figure 7.28 (b) Deitic gesture 15:52 min (30/01/2008, 1st part of the recording)



(RDF gesture) Iconics: (a) both hands moving drawing a square, (b) right arm drawing a slope (moving upwards), (c) both hands drawing a semicircle.

R 5 CH: In a house?

F+I

6

TCH: In a house. So 'house' we can put here (writes on a chart). They live… animals and plants can live in houses. Andrea, can you tell me an example of an animal that lives in a house? (RDF question)


8

TCH: Think. An animal that lives in a house? (RDF question) (RDF gesture) Metaphoric: Left hand pointing at her head.


Figure 7.31 (c) Iconic gesture 16:10 min (30/01/2008, 1st part of the recording)

Figure 7.32 Metaphoric gesture 16:40 min (30/01/2008, 1st part of the recording)


R I

R

9 10 11

CH: No answer. TCH: One animal that lives in the house? (RDF question) CH: No answer.

I

12

TCH: One animal that lives in the house? (RDF question) (RDF gesture) Iconic: (a) Slight movement upwards with the right hand, (b) Two hands drawing a triangle.

R 13 CH: %L1 ¿En la casa? L1% F 14 TCH: Yes. R 15 CH: A cat.

F+I 16 TCH: A cat. Fantastic. Any other animal?

Extract 7.6 Triadic Dialogue in CLIL, Science, 1st Primary (1st lesson).

Extract 7.6 focuses not only in iconics –which is how Andrea answered properly

in line 12, 13-, but also on the effects of the deictic gesture in students’ responses. The

instructor talked about plants and animals. She started being a mediator with an open

question “where do plants live?”, and a deictic gesture in both sections of a chart that

she wrote, that was divided into two: characteristics of plants on one side and




characteristics of animals in the other. Thus, the instructor situated students in the

context. In line 1 she pointed at a word –instead of a clear space- in the chart (soil) that

was not related to the question (habitats of plants). Therefore, students who were

guided by what they saw instead of what they listened, produced a wrong answer. This

was a consequence of an inadequate gesture. Finally, iconic –pictograhic- gestures were

used to indicate to their students that their attempt answer was not acceptable and to

encourage them to self correct by providing visual and verbal cues (greenhouse, field,

garden).

The frequent use of a mixture of RDF gestures in our data of teacher’s CLIL

classroom discourse is mainly related to the frequent use of both deictic and iconic

gestures. According to the results, 41% of the mixture had to do with the combination of

deictic and iconics. The rest did not follow a clear pattern, although the majority of the

compound gestural RDF functions included a deictic.

7.3 Is there any difference in use of questions and gestures depending on the

pedagogical purposes?

Table 7.3 shows if questions and gestures were used differently in particular stages

of a teaching-learning sequence in CLIL classrooms. Although more data should be

analyzed in this section in order to get more significant results, there is a slight

difference between the 1st and the 2nd lesson referring to the number of RDF functions

used by the teacher in the classroom interaction. If we look at the distribution of RDF

scaffolding function in the two sessions, we can observe a higher number of functions in

the session where contents were reviewed. This reflects a tendency of using more this

strategy of simplifying input in a review CLIL lesson (51%), than when the teacher is

introducing new contents (49%).


Figure 7.3 Teacher’s RDF function in both CLIL lessons.

The pie-charts below focus on the distribution of the RDF function within each

session; that is, on which of the elements –questions or gestures- dominated in the

function. Results show that in both cases the RDF function was performed more

frequently by the two modes (74% in 1st lesson; 62% in the 2nd), followed by gestures

(20% in 1st lesson; 26% in the 2nd), and questions (6% in the 1st lesson; 12% in the 2nd).

Figure 7.35 a. Distribution of the teacher’s RDF function in the 1st CLIL lesson.


Figure 7.35 b. Distribution of the teacher’s RDF function in the 2nd CLIL lesson.

Even if the contrast is not too large, there was also a tendency of using more

RDF questions and gestures together in the 1st CLIL lesson than in the 2nd lesson;

whereas more RDF gestures were employed in reviewing the content. According to the

Table 7.3 previously shown, there was a higher frequency of deictics in this 2nd session

which were complemented by flashcards and realia.

8. DISCUSSION

Based on this analysis, we can state that scaffolding is a viable framework for

investigating teacher questions and gestures in CLIL classroom interaction. The concept

of scaffolding originated by Wood et al. (1976) including the Reduction of Degrees of

Freedom function, demonstrates how teacher questions and gestures are modified in

order to achieve students’ comprehension and comprehensibility in the CLIL lesson.

Hence, the teacher’s use of questions and gestures in this study reflects characteristics of

scaffolding as described by McCormick and Donato (2000).

Specifically, in the analysis we noticed that the teacher’s use of RDF function

with questions and gestures expanded the students’ learning during difficulties with


comprehension. The RDF function in particular appeared frequently in CLIL teacher’s

discourse as a consequence of being interacting with really young learners whose

command in L2 production was limited to isolated words. Moreover, if we take the

context into account, CLIL provides opportunities for learning through acquisition

rather than through explicit teaching, which contributes to the fact that exposure is

presented meaningfully (Fernández Fontecha, 2008; Marsh, 2002; Muñoz, 2002;

Stevens, 1983). In the current study, instead of having a teacher monologue during the

main lesson, teacher and learner benefited from whole class interaction (cf. Hatch 1992)

where problems were solved due to the collaboration of both participants in a IRF

exchange (Dalton Puffer, 2007). This idea is being supported by some authors who

claimed that, in this activity, “the expert constructs an elaborate support structure within

which the novice may speak” (Poole, 1990: 204). The way of building this supportive

structure is strongly related to the scaffolding process, which is considered as a “process

that enables a child or novice to solve a problem, carry out a task or achieve a goal

which would be beyond his unassisted efforts” (Wood et al, 1976: 90). It is important to

mention that the assistance cannot be fully exploited by learners if comprehension of the

solution does not precede production. Therefore, in this research, CLIL teacher

continuously modified input in order for students to be able to understand the

information they were asked. Another reason why this RDF function prevailed in the

data can be related to the fact that, as Long points out, “input becomes comprehensible

through the speech modifications of native speakers addressing non-native speakers of

the target language” (1983: 126). Based on our observations supported by other studies

mentioned above we respond to our first hypothesis dealing with input adjustment as a

strategy for learners’ comprehension.

Previous research on this kind of native/non-native interaction or tutor/novice

interaction showed that one of these modifications had to do with speaker’s use of

questions (Long, 1981; McCormick and Donato, 2000). Based on those studies, and in

our results, we can state that while language played a central role in mediating learning,

the use of other semiotic systems not only favored students’ comprehensibility of the

language but also gave support to learners’ construction of meaning. Visual input

constituted a crucial tool for teachers in the construction and development of the


scaffolding strategy, and for students who profited from an increment of input which

facilitated their understanding and production of the second language. We cannot forget

that the classroom is multimodal which means that concepts are depicted “via a range of

modes, in image, in speech, in experiment/demonstration, with models, into different

senses representing the addresser’s interests” (Kress, 2001: 339). In that sense, we

already mentioned that Kress (2001) claimed that sometimes speech communicates part

of the meaning that is complemented by other semiotic features, but on other occasions

visual input performs tasks alone that cannot be done by language. The fact that in the

analysis RDF function was generally performed by means of the combination of verbal

and nonverbal communication was not merely a coincidence. It is now proved that

when the teacher interacted with her students, different modes were used in order to

make herself understood. It is through the partnership between speech and gesture that

utterance meaning is achieved. Therefore, we agree with Kendon (2000) in his idea of

gesture considered as “a mode of symbolic representation, just as spoken language is.

However, in gesture representation is achieved in ways that are different from spoken

language” (Kendon, 2000:50). We saw that the CLIL teacher often employed gesture to

make something that was being said more precise or complete. It is quite clear that her

gestures were organized in relation to the questions they accompanied in such a way

that they were part of the construction of the utterance itself. Gestures and questions, in

all the examples given in this research, were composed together as components of a

single plan; and the analysis of the RDF function showed what Kendon (2000) claimed

in his study, which is that questions and gestures “are co-expressive of a single inclusive

ideational complex, and it is this that is the meaning of the utterance” (2000:61). This

confirms why in our data gestures and questions tended to be used together.

If we go back to the analysis of questions, we saw the teacher rarely performing the

RDF scaffolding function by questions alone. When this happened it could be as a result

of redundancy or a routine of questions established by the instructor. Most of the time

the learner knew the question that was coming in advance. In the case of the topic that

was part of the analysis, three were the only questions asked: What’s this? What colour

is this? Which part of the plant do we eat? At other times, the question was repeated

and used as a tool for building redundancy. Hence, the question was supported by visual


input presenting the idea with more information for learners to be able to understand it,

so they could give the right answer. This is what Navés (1999) considers as one

characteristic of successful CLIL programs. This feature is present therefore in the

CLIL class we analyzed. What we already mentioned explains the presence of questions

in isolation.

The RDF function with gestures, on its part, was more frequently used than

questions alone. One of the reasons might have to do with the fact that imagery is more

precise in triggering a wide range of associations, so the use of gestures in the

classroom may stimulate a clearer and faster understanding of the concept (Cuadrado et

al, 1999). However, as we saw in the data, gestures were not performed alone. A slight

amount of elicitations, instead of questions, was found when the teacher used

gesticulation. This can also be connected to the Ehlich and Rehbein (1986) notion of

“verbal game” in the IRF interaction. In our data, elicitations and RDF gestures were

applied when the teacher wanted to elicit the right word from learners. According to

these authors, children aged 4-6 –which is our case- posses the productive competence

to participate in this kind of knowledge game that resembles a riddle. The CLIL teacher

posed the riddle as she knew the solution. In our research, the tutor used elicitations

followed by a gesture so that the students tried to guess the concept. The learner was

then under the communicative obligation to seek the solution and that included various

attempts at finding the right answer. Thus, we demonstrate why a combination of

gestures and elicitations appeared also in the data.

We believe the type of gestures the teacher used for the non verbal RDF function

is also relevant. In this specific CLIL classroom interaction, there was a tendency of

using deictics, followed by iconics, and a mixture of different gestures. Previous

research on this field (Adams 1998) considered iconic and deictics as gestures that

expressed ideas in a concrete way. Moreover, images combined with deictic gestures

were teachers’ main resource in our study and in others, and where no visual display

was at hand, she created it herself by means of imagistic gestures. We assume this is

due to her intention of facilitating understanding. Visuals, as we mentioned in Part I,


posses the characteristic of expressing the meaning of an utterance or word faster and

more precise in triggering a wide range of associations than language.

When we analyzed questions and gestures working together in the RDF function,

the amount of results collected was considerably greater than with the instances already

discussed. We observed that both questions and gestures were the core of the

scaffolding process. By using them, the teacher simplified the information that she gave

or asked to the students. Even though the questions, as we mentioned before, were quite

basic, input was almost in all teacher turns complemented by a visual representation of

the same concept. Thus, we identified several samples where the learner could produce

the appropriate answer after not just listening, but also seeing in gestures the concept the

teacher was asking for. Such modification of the input is related to the idea of some

authors like Dalton Puffer who states that, in the whole classroom interaction, there is a

“progressively diminishing complexity of questions” (2007:117). In our data, when no

student answer seemed to be forthcoming, the teacher normally followed up the initial,

more complex question with a less complex one, repeating the step until an answer was

given. At this point we observed the connection between gestures and speech as a single

process of presenting meaning as the complexity also diminished because of the

addition of more concrete gestures, such as imagistic gestures. According to Sime

(2008: 273), “teachers recognize the situations when learners are puzzled or confused

and the gestural clues become a part of the more general strategy of encouraging

learner’s participation”. In the current study the teacher, when facilitating input, used

mainly concrete deictic or pointing gestures to draw learners’ attention to an object or a

task. In other words, teacher’s imagistic gestures (drawing with hands or pointing at an

object or space) appeared whenever she wanted to situate the learner in the context and

made him or her understand the concept she requested. In this regard, Lazaraton (2004)

claims in his study that “classroom L2 learners receive considerable input in non verbal

form that may modify and make verbal input (more) comprehensible” (p.111). Findings

indicate that there is an inherent synchronicity of speech and gesture, so what we

propose in this research is that RDF scaffolding function (Wood et al., 1976;

McCormick and Donato, 2000) is not only performed in CLIL classroom interaction by

questions, but also by gestures. Moreover, there were some occasions in the data where


gestures appeared in absence of speech. This is also supported by some other studies

which stated that “teachers concretize the verbal element through gestures that are tuned

at the learners’ ZPD and lead in subtle ways the learning efforts” (Sime, 2008: 273).

It is also worth mentioning the cultural aspect of gestures. Emblems or

conventionalized signs, although not being a focus of this study, can be and they were,

in some instances during the analysis, a powerful tool for achieving learners’

comprehension. For that reason, Lanzaraton and Ishihara (2005) indicate that second

language teachers must be aware of their behavior. Their importance lies in the

culturally-specific nature of those gestures used in the CLIL classroom. We observed

that the learner identified the meaning of the gesture sometimes due to its cultural

overtone. We can then wonder if teacher used gestures as an L1 and speech as an L2. In

other words, if the learner understood the gesture better as it belonged to his or her

culture, whereas the speech did not have any relationship to his or her mother tongue.

Therefore, we should bear this in mind for a further research. By these arguments, we

answer our second hypothesis dealing with gestures and questions as two connected

modes which express the same pragmatic and semantic meaning.

Finally our last premise had to do with the difference in usage of questions and

gestures depending on the pedagogical purposes. Our analysis on teacher’s use of RDF

questions and gestures in different sessions showed that there was a slight difference

referring to the number of the RDF scaffolding functions performed between the first

lesson, that was theoretical and teacher used less RDF functions, and the second one

that was a review of the previous session and she used more RDF functions. This can be

a consequence of the aim of that classroom session, although more data should be

analyzed to get more accurate findings. The fact that more deictic gestures were found

in the 2nd lesson, may be due to the quantity of concepts that needed to be reviewed, and

that is connected to the higher frequency of visual aids like flashcards that also

appeared. Another possibility has to do with the instruction of new concepts, which

derived into a slower explanation of the topics and lesser content within the lesson.


9. SOME CONCLUDING REMARKS.

As explained along this work, our interest lies on CLIL classroom discourse and,

more specifically, on teacher turns within the I-R-F structure in the whole-classroom

interaction. Throughout this research we tried to give response to the hypotheses raised

in the introduction mainly dealing with the possibility of having a single underlying

verbal-gestural process of constructing and presenting meanings which teachers should

apply on learner’s benefit. Moreover, investigating not only teacher questions but

gestures within scaffolding framework provided insight into some methodological and

pedagogical aspects in relation to the second language learning.

Our first hypothesis referred to the need to observe if teacher-modified verbal and

non-verbal input in bilingual (CLIL) programs was used as a main tool in a scaffolding

process. The results of the data analysis revealed that it was by means of simplifying or

modifying the verbal and non verbal input using the RDF scaffolding function that the

instructor achieved students’ understanding. In this 1st Primary CLIL classroom we

found a greater use of this scaffolding function than the rest of functions, which implied

a continuous intention of clarifying the information to young learners. In accordance

with these outcomes, we tried to go further with the second hypothesis in observing if

gestures and speech were integral parts of a single process, both manifesting the same

pragmatic and semantic meaning. We observed that the input adjustment was managed

by a process of diminishing complexity of questions (Dalton Puffer, 2007) and

increasing concreteness of gestures or emergence of visual aids. Both modes were then

complementing each other and expressing the same concepts visually and verbally.

Using just one mode was not enough, so in the data there was a predominance of the

RDF function where language and gestures worked together. Ultimately, our results

showed a difference in the use of RDF functions between the 1st and the 2nd CLIL

lessons, and that provided an answer to our last assumption. This scaffolding function

could be performed distinctively depending on the pedagogical purposes, as more RDF

functions were found when the teacher was reviewing.

Although this study has some positive points such as the fact that there were not

many previous studies onto which this one was based, it is necessary to mention its


drawbacks as well. First of all, none of the results obtained are statistically significant.

This may be due to the fact that the quantity of data is not enough. More data is also

needed in order to generalise the results presented here, especially regarding teachers’

turns. Teachers’ questions and gestures were analysed in two lessons, but there were

other four left in order to complete the study of the whole unit in that 1st Primary

classroom. Another limitation of this investigation is that there were many instances

where different scaffolding functions coincided, so it was difficult to analyse the RDF

function separately. Moreover, as there was only one researcher working in the analysis

doubts about labelling the function arose on some occasions. Finally, there was an

added difficulty in the transcription describing the gestures as many movements were

performed simultaneously.

This piece of research could have some pedagogical implications. The most

important one would be that teachers could be aware of the importance of their gestures.

That is, they have to know that their gesticulation influences students’ comprehension

and that may be connected to their oral production. In this sense, it is essential that they

try to improve students’ output and, in order to do so, an adjustment of visual and verbal

input will help them. Teachers will know what types of questions, and especially

gestures, produce a greater level of understanding. Nevertheless, we are conscious of

the necessity of an analysis of students’ production, and a closer research on the

connection between questions’ types and gestures -display/ referential (Mehan 1979)

and open/close (Barnes 1969)-, among others. Moreover, it is desirable that the other

five scaffolding functions will be under consideration in order to add more significant

results to this study. In our view, comparing content teacher and CLIL teacher discourse

also opens up an important area for further research.

We are fully aware that the use of semiotic systems and language modes in the

classroom gives students access to messages from a variety of sources. In a CLIL

environment message abundancy (Gibbons 2003) is critical for its learners, as second

language is not only the subject of study but a vehicle for content transmission. We

believe that gestures represent for students one more bite at the cherry as they are

engaged with knowledge and concepts.

R e f e r e n c e s | 74

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A p p e n d i x | 84

APPENDIXES:

Appendix A. CLIL Teachers’ Questionnaire

PRO-CLIL: Providing guidelines for CLIL implementation in

Primary and Pre-primary education

Questionnaire for teachers

Thank you for your willingness to take part in this international project. Your answers are of great importance to the success of the project and will be treated confidentially. The instructions on how to complete the questionnaire are given below. Please read them carefully and complete the questionnaire as requested.

Instructions

• Open and closed questions: o The questionnaire contains open and closed questions. o The closed questions are followed by a closed range of options from which you can choose the

option that best meets your particular situation. o Open questions are questions where no pre-set answer categories are provided and where you

can type in your answer. • Submitting your answers:

Section 1: About you

• School Name the name of the school you are working in ___CEIP CIUDAD DE COLUMBIA. _______________________________________________________________

• Degree/Qualifications: Name the type of teaching degree you have DIPLOMADA EN PROFESORADO DE EGB. Esp. Filología Inglesa.

__________________________________________________________________


Section 2: Your experience in CLIL

• Extent of experience in years. Please, tick the correct number:

1 2 3 4 More. Please, number them _________

• Duties. Please, tick the correct option:

Teacher

Coordinator

• Age/group: Please, tick the correct option. Primary

Primary

Pre-primary

Section 3: Specific training received on CLIL

Please tick the option that match your case and give details in the typing area

below.

• General English language improvement programme: YES NO

If yes:

Duration: __________________________________________________________

Institution: _________________________________________________________

Place/Country: _____________________________________________________

• CLIL Training Programmes: YES NO

If yes:


Duration:1month___________________________________________________

Institution: Nile: Norwich Institute of Language Education

Place/Country: Norwich, England

Others I’ve participated in different courses about CLIL teaching and I made a speech (CRIF ACACIAS) about teaching Clil through storytelling.

Section 4: Content Subjects

Which subject areas do you teach in the bilingual programme?

• Science Hours per week: 4+4

• Art & Craft Hours per week: ¾ + ¾.

• Music Hours per week: _______________________

• Physical Education Hours per week: _______________________

• Other: English. Hours per week: 5 + 5

Section 5: Materials

Please, tick the correct option and indicate percentage:

a) What kind of materials do you use?

• Your own materials: __50__ %

• Published subject materials: _40_____ %

Publisher: Oxford Richmond/Santillana Others _Mc Grow Hill,

Jolly Phonics, Pearson, Heinemann, Usborne...

• Electronic/digital resources: _10_____ %


b) If you develop your own materials, are they based on Spanish resources?

YES NO ____________ %

Or on English resources?

YES NO ____100________ % Or I invent them.

Section 6: Describing your practice in CLIL

Please, tick the correct option and if necessary, indicate percentage:

a) Are you ‘free’ to choose the areas taught in CLIL? YES NO

b) In subject areas, is the main focus on

1. Content?

2. Language?

3. Both? In this case, indicate percentage for Content __50__ % & for Language_50___%

c) What language is used in the following cases (please, circle / indicate percentage?

1. Teacher input:

Spanish

English

Both In this case, indicate percentage for Spanish____% & for English ____%

2. Pupil talk

Spanish

English


Both In this case, indicate percentage for Spanish___80_% & for English ___20_%

3. Classroom management

Spanish

English


4. Materials

Spanish

English


5. Evaluation

Spanish

English

Both In this case, indicate percentage for Spanish____% & for English

____%

d) What is the amount of content knowledge assessed in CLIL subjects? ___50_____ %

e) What is the amount of language knowledge assessed in CLIL subjects? ____50____ %

f) Are the subject contents somehow adapted or simplified when they are taught in

English? YES NO


If yes, explain how and why:

They are adapted (not simplified), the methodology is completely different,

there is a wider range of activities with lots of visuals involved as well as body

language, critical thinking, brainstorming, pair work, choral work etc. The main

objective for a teacher in a CLIL methodology is teaching through

understanding in a natural way. The kids don’t even realize how much English

they are learning.

Do pupils interact / participate more in CLIL? YES NO

If yes, explain how and why:

The methodology has to be very active. Teacher has to check

understanding all the time through games, questions...you have to make sure that

pupils are not getting lost and that they are listening to you because listening is

the first step for understanding.

g) In a didactic unit, please, indicate time percentage devoted to: h)

1. practical activities ___50___ % and reasoning/exploratory talk

___50____%

2. teacher talk __80____ % and pupil talk _20_____ %

3. listening _60___ % talking __20___ % reading _10__ % writing

_10___%

4. feedback on language __50__% and subject concepts __50__%


Section 7: Benefits and Drawbacks

Please rank the following statements in order of importance through assigning

each a number between 1 and 4. You assign the number 1 to the reason you consider

most important and 4 to the reason you consider least important. You have to assign a

number to each objective, and you can only assign each number once.

Do you feel bilingual education brings benefits on? YES NO

1. the improvement in learners’ English competence;

1 2 3 4

2. the consideration of English as an important subject;

1 2 3 4 3. the improvement of the Knowledge of the English culture

1 2 3 4

4. the construction of European citizenship

1 2 3 4

Others:

Bilingual education should open our children a gate to a different culture, to a

different language, to a different way of doing things and to different people.

Do you feel bilingual education affects negatively? YES NO

1. on the knowledge on specific contents (Science /Art / Music/ PE)

1 2 3 4

2. on the knowledge of Spanish language;

1 2 3 4 3. on the knowledge of English language;

1 2 3 4

4. Interference between Spanish and English

1 2 3 4


Others:

______________________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________________

What would you improve in the bilingual programme?

I would increase the resources. If a child from a non bilingual school came into

the school, I would have a person responsible of doing an “immersion programme” with

that student. I wouldn’t allow children who cannot speak Spanish into a bilingual school

after year one without the proper help. There should be a “compensatoria” teacher able

to teach CLIL subjects in English, if not, I would give those children the option of

taking only English and do the rest of the subjects in Spanish with the “compensatoria”

teacher so that they can have a Primary degree non bilingual which is better than

nothing. We cannot open a gate to some students closing one to others. We have to bear

in mind that we are not god and not all the students can cope with the programme.

What activity do you think better improves students’ competence?

Storytelling is my favourite activity because from a story you can improve any

competence you want to.

Additional comments

I would like to add that I am very disappointed about the administration. The

help it is giving is very little compared to the effort teachers have to make. I also think it

is incredible that we go to our “Twinned schools” during our holidays and paying

everything in advance. We get only 1000 Euros of the money we have spent seven

months after we go. There should be free courses at the “British Council School”

(which are very good), there should be free courses in England or America to recycle

teachers. I think the government should invest in quality and, right now, they are

investing in quantity. I really believe in this project, I don’t want anybody or anything

stop making me feel this way.


Appendix B. Codes and Transcriptions.

Transcription Codes:

TCH: teacher

Ass: assistant

CH: child

(( hands up )): paralinguistic information

[ …]: overlapping words

%x…x%: not understandable

%L1….L1%: spoken in Spanish

…..: unfinished sentences.

Moves:

(I): Initiation

(R): Response

(F): Feedback

(I+F): Initiation and Feedback.

Gesticulation:

[where do animals live]: Period where the gesture is performed.

(a) (b) (c)...: gestures tagging.

Word in Bold: when the gesture and speech coincide.


Appendix C. Example from the corpus.

Text

Turn Move Teacher (TCH) Student (CH) 1 (I) TCH: …and do you remember [where do animals live]?

a.

(a) **Deictic: With her index finger pointing at the right-hand side of the board.

2 (R) CH: mmmm.

3 (I) TCH: [Where do animals] live [ ]?a. b.

(a) Metaphoric: Cup-shape hands move out from centre to side: the idea of asking.

(b) Interactive (i-move). 4 (R) CH: [[In the jungle]]

5 (F+I) TCH: In the jungle for example, (she write on the board)… so we're [talking about habitats].

a.

(a) Beat: Open hand held up and moving forwards highlighting the word.

6 (R) CH: In the house.

7 (F-I) TCH: [In the house] if [they are pets] [].a. b. c.

(a) **Iconic: Two hands shaping a triangle as a roof. (b) *Beat: Open hands (cup shaped). (c) Interactive (i-move)

8 (R) CH: In the country.

9 (F) TCH: [In the country] if they live in a farm. (writing down) So, a. in the jungle, in a house..

(a) * Beat: Index finger moving downwards accepting the answer. Positive feedback.

10 (R) CH: In a country.

11 (F) TCH: In the country and we've said they can live in a farm. Ok. (She is still writing on the board)

12 (R) CH: And a park.

13 (F) TCH: In the park (she goes to the board and writes)

14 (I) CH: %L1 También en las montañas ¿no? L1%

15 (F+I) TCH: In the park [] (She writes) Any? a.

(a) Interactive.


16 (R) CH: %L1 Eh, en las montañas L1%

17 (R) CH: %x…x%

18 (F) TCH: [In the forest, in the forest]. (she writes) a.

(a) *Beats: moving forwards the finger holding the marker. 19 (I) CH: % L1 Lo he dicho yo

L1% 20 (R) CH: %L1 En las montañas L1

% 21 (F+I) TCH: [I think that's enough. I think that´s enough.] Ok. [And

a. plants live, Where do plants live?]

b.

(a) Beats: Several movements with both hands opened. Like a fan.

(b) **Deictic: Pointing with the marker at the left-hand side of the board.

22 (R) CH: Soil.

23 (R) CH: Sunlight.

24 (F+I) TCH: [Yes, yes], that's what they need, but where do they live? a.

They can live, remember we say [they can live in a….

(a) Beat: Both hands move upwards and close together. 25 (R) CH: Soil.

26 (I) TCH: in a green]. a.

(a)**Iconic: Two hands moving downwards drawing a square.

27 (R) TCH, CH: [[house]]

28 (I) TCH: [in a big field], [in a garden].

a. b. (a)** Iconic: Left arm upwards and right arm drawing a slope. (b) **Iconic: Both hands opened drawing a circle.

29 (R) CH: In a house?

30 (F+I) TCH: [In a house]. [Ok?] So ['house'] we can put here (writes). a. b. c.

House, they live..animals and plants can live in houses. Eh, Andrea, can you tell me [an example] of an animal that lives in a house? d.


(a) *Deictic: Right hand pointing a student. (b) Iconic: Left hand pointing at her head. (c)** Deictic: Index finger pointing at the board. (d) **Deictic: Index finger pointing at the board (word “house”)

31 (R) CH: No answer.

32 (I) TCH: [Think]. [An animal that lives in a house]. a. b.

(a) Iconic: Left hand pointing at her head. (b) Beats: three slight movements with the head.

33 (R) CH: No answer.

34 (I) TCH: [One animal] [that lives in the house]. a. b. c.

(a) Iconic: Slight movement upwards with the right hand. (b) Beat: Slight flick with the left hand. (c) Iconic: Two hands drawing a triangle.

35 (I) CH: Ahh, %L1 Yo, yo, yo, yo L1%

36 (I) CH: (another student) %L1 ¿En la casa? L1%

37 (R) TCH: [Yes]. a.

(a) Emblem: nodding.

38 (R) CH: A cat.

39 (F+I) TCH: [A cat]. Fantastic. Any other animal?[ ] a. b.

(a) *Deictic: Pointing at the student with the right hand. (b) Interactive.

40 (R) CH: A dog.

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