Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL): A Methodology of Bilingual Teaching

2.6 Language Learning as a Social Process—The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)

Considering both input and output hypotheses, language learning is then seen as a social process guided by interaction and fostered by cognition. In the tradition of Lev Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky: 1962, see above) the origins of cognitive and mental activities are embedded within the social domain. The guiding concept here is the ZPD within which learning is enabled by problem-solving activities of learners if these are acting supported by more knowledgeable peers or teachers.

Writing about the relation of thought and language (Thought and Language 1962), Vygotsky devises a concept of (language) development and combines with it a theory of education. More based on common sense and observation than systematic scientific research, he monitored children learning to talk and solving problems. His concept of ZPD not only influenced contemporary Soviet psychologists but also elicited comments by leading Western educators like Jean Piaget and was only much later—and in fact after the end of the Cold War—known and appreciated in mainstream learning theories.

A further step needs to be discussed in this context. With the growing importance of cognition, the aim to acquire curricular content at the same time as language itself is connectable to language awareness. In the United Kingdom, for example, this process was embedded in the challenge to enhance literary education where children’s needs of language learning needed to be met (cf. the findings of the Bullock-Commission in Great Britain 1972-75). In order to link linguistic demands and content challenges it is generally expedient to realize that pragmatic speech functions and macro-operations correspond with each other and are intensified by reciprocal support—as expressed in task-verbs like describe, illuminate, assess, conclude etc. Content-based teaching, according to the language-across-the-curriculum approach (LAC; cf. Meisel: 160 ff), has always to be considered as language teaching, because linguistic and cognitive development show a close connection. The LAC approach has been interpreted as a specific version of Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) and is also closely associated with CLIL and immersion programs (cf. ibid.: 161).

Interdisciplinary teaching in the sense of LAC is not only of professional benefit for instructors but also facilitates the enhancement of literary competence in the classroom discourse where more often than not certain gaps have become conspicuous. This is particularly true for students with a migration background, but deficits in the “language of schooling” are visible in mainstream cohorts as well. The aim to develop aspects of academic language in all subject areas is still as much part of the aforementioned theory of practice as it is not consistently part of everyday classroom routines. Some initiating guidelines for this LAC approach have been explored by language-sensitive curricula, namely “40 learner tools” by the German teacher trainer and physics professor Josef Leisen8, but a comprehensive methodology does not seem to be available so far (cf.: Wolff 2011: 81).

“Language of schooling”, however, remains important within the constructivist theory of encouraging students to creatively build their own learning cycles and thus—at least in the long run—become their own teachers. This is at the heart of Visible Learning (VL), which according to the aforementioned NZ educationalist John Hattie, occurs when teachers see learning through the eyes of their students and help them close the gap between their prior knowledge and the intended learning outcomes, language- or content-wise. Hattie’s concept of VL with Direct Instruction as one of its key components (see above) was developed more than ten years ago and has since become a world-wide influential approach to effective teaching and successful learning (cf. De Florio: 2016). It is based on his meta-analyses with data obtained from more than 300 million students comparing developments from the Australian, American and British education systems (Visible Learning 2009).

Key factors like cognitive task analysis, scaffolding, reciprocal teaching, feedback, direct instruction and behavior organizers will be discussed in detail in the context of dimensions of bilingual teaching (chapter 5 & 6), but at this stage it should be noted that three kinds of achievement factors played a major role for successful learning according to the data collected, i.e. feedback, student expectations and formative evaluation. These aspects represent strategies of best teaching practice and are instrumental to close the gap between student previous knowledge and aspired aims and objectives, applicable to learning processes in general and language acquisition in particular.

Hattie’s idea of Visible Learning is, other than the proposition of a Universal Grammar (Chomsky) or a so-called Human Language Making Capacity (Meisel: 34 ff), based on empirical research and provides a practical alternative to language-based teaching strategies to bridge the gap between (language) knowledge and performance and intercultural competence (cf. chapters 5 & 6.6), especially in a CLIL context. In order to bridge this gap—namely between students’ prior knowledge and successfully accomplishing relevant content-based and communicative tasks—their ZPD has to be taken into account. ZPD, as delineated before, is first and above all, an explanation of social interaction between a child and knowledgeable adults. Based on the theories of former Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky (cf. Klewitz 2017a: 15 f.) the ZPD was made available for mainstream discussions by Jerome Bruner (ibid.).

It is in accordance with curricular research and official recommendations such as the German framework for final school examinations (Abitur), defining graded learning objectives (“Lern-zielstufen”) proposed by the Federal Conference of Ministers of Education (KMK: 2013). These recommendations encompass four general stages (to close the ZPD gaps) as reproduction, reorganization, transfer and problem-solving (also reflection), supported by action-based task-verbs (German “Operatoren”) that are mandatory in final school examinations and relate to different cognitive operations like analyze, examine, characterize, compare, assess, evaluate, discuss, develop, describe, name, outline (cf. Klewitz 2019: 28), also known in taxonomies of long-standing use (Krautwohl, Coyle 2010).

Review—reflect—research

What does Dr. Johnson’s reflection on “language as the dress of thought” tell us about the origin of language?

Consider the differences between language acquisition and language learning. Do you agree with the practice in academic literature to use both terms interchangeably?

Visible Learning might coincide with the Zone of Proximal Development, so which gains can be expected from this sustainable teaching strategy?

1 Speakers of Gaelic were persecuted over the centuries: in the Scottish Lowlands there was still a cross-over between English and Scottish Gaelic whereas in the 18th century the Highlands were more or less exclusively Gaelic. (cf.: https://www.visitscotland.com/about/uniquely-scottish/gaelic/. Last viewed 03/05/2021)

2 In: https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/oats/. Last viewed 03/05/2021.

3 Numerous entries in blogs also address this metaphor as a controversy, e.g. In: https://www.usingenglish.com/poll/63.html. Last viewed 03/05/2021.

4 An older essay by the late Columbia University Professor Nicolas Christy discusses variations on this topic in his essay “Is Language the Dress of Thought?” (Christy 1980: 98-106), on which the following considerations are based.

5 About the difference between “learning” and “acquisition” see footnote 9 and the respective entry in the Glossary.

6 The German daily newspaper “Frankfurter Allgemeine” published an article written by a Berlin teacher whose students had asked him when they could go back to frontal teaching—with the catching title “Wann machen Sie wieder Fron-talunterricht?” (FAZ 01/14/2016). More details about teaching styles can be found in the next chapters (3 & 4).

7 A proper and research-based differentiation between language acquisition and learning can be found in the respective glossary entry of our book.

8 Shown in “Methodenwerkzeuge im sprachsensiblen Fachunterricht“: http://www.sprachsensiblerfachunterricht.de/methoden-werkzeuge. Last viewed 03/05/2021.

Chapter 3

Nature versus Nurture
Vignette “The American Experience”

In her essay “The Measure of America” for The New Yorker (March 8, 2004), the journalist and Columbia University Professor Dr. Claudia Roth Pierpont discusses the connection between the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1893) and “How a rebel anthropologist waged war on racism”. She referred to the German scholar Franz Boas, who had emigrated from Germany ten years before, “staunch in the belief that America was politically an ideal country” (Roth Pierpont 2004: n.p.). Boas was concerned about the dichotomy of nature versus nurture, which he pursued in a lifetime of academic and field studies involving his students. The Chicago Exposition marked the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’ “discovery” of America and was opened as the “White City” on the marshy lands along Lake Michigan. What was deemed to be the achievements of the nation, displays of the Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln’s Inaugural Address and replicas of the Liberty Bell, could be admired. Where criticism of the young German anthropologist came into play was the exhibit of human characters, called The American Experience:

… [an] extraordinary assembly of peoples. American Indians and native Africans, Germans, Egyptians, and Labrador Eskimos were just a few of those invited to take part in nearly a hundred ‘living exhibits’—whole villages were imported and exactingly rebuilt-with the purpose of expanding American minds: ‘broadening, opening, lighting up dark corners,’ a contemporary magazine expounded, ‘bringing them in sympathy with their fellow men’ (ibid.).

“The American experience” was a popular theme during the whole 19th century, epitomized by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West (founded 1883 by Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody), which displayed cowboy themes and episodes from the frontier and Indian Wars. The show was tremendously popular and also very successful in Europe (invitation by the Pope twice) but remained controversial. It was, for instance, not admitted to the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and Cody had to set up an independent exhibition near the Fair.

In the days leading up to the Fair’s opening, Franz Boas in his turn organized setting up houses in which a group of Northwest Coast Indians were to live temporarily, near a location on a small lake marked “Anthropology”. Boas had spent the preceding years researching the lives of these Indians—motivated by the Indian exhibits and artefacts of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. This location contained Native American artefacts like masks and decorated tools which Boas had collected during his research and which he hoped would attract the admiration of visitors through their wealth of imagination.

The Indians on the Fair were asked to perform dances and other rituals to demonstrate examples of their culture and had been assured that they would be paid the respect they were owed, although that had not been their experience in the US of the 19th century. Their lives were, in reality, dominated by the aftermath of the Indian Removals between 1830 and 1850 and the infamous “Trail of Tears”, on which more than 100,000 Native Americans and their black slaves were forcefully removed from their land by the US government and where thousands of their people died. This catastrophe had been justified in the name of the new field of Anthropology and seen as a result of the “natural racial order” proposing the right of white settlers to seize the natives’ land and the prevailing system of slavery (adapted from: Roth Pierpont: 2004 n.p.).

The issues of slavery and of using living exhibits as an excuse of anthropological “research” is also featuring as a predominant topic in Colson Whitehead’s recent novel The Underground Railroad, in which the African-American writer remeasures the atrocities of slavery in the US. In Whitehead’s novel Cora, a runaway slave from a particularly savage cotton plantation in ante-bellum Georgia (in the 1850s), is offered a job in the “Museum of Natural Wonders” (clearly reminiscent of the New York American Museum of Natural History). She serves as a living exhibit in three different theme rooms:

“Scenes from Darkest Africa”

“Life on the Slave Ship”

“Typical Day on the Plantation” (Whitehead 2016: 130/1).

Cora is suspicious of the accuracy of the presentations and wary of the visitors’ behavior in “disrespectful fashion” and “rude suggestions” (ibid.: 132). Neither is she too convinced that her “habitat” really “illuminate[s] the American experience” (ibid.: 138), because her life as a slave tells her otherwise (cf. ibid.: 137-140).

Back in the last century, the anthropologist Boas assigned his twenty-three-year old student Margaret Mead a study on adolescence which she accomplished as an interrogation of Samoan girls about their sex lives:

With an introduction by Boas and a cover showing a bare-breasted girl rushing to a tryst with her lover beneath tropical palms, “Coming of Age in Samoa,” published [by Mead] in 1928, was both an aphrodisiac and a call to arms. … dwelling on her tales of teen-age girls choosing strings of lovers with lighthearted ease, Americans conspired in the fantasy of a society in which there was no adolescent angst, no unhappy marriage, no jealousy, no Oedipus complex, and no emotional suffering of any kind. The utopian aspects of Mead’s book were as gratefully seized on as the sex: if nurture could so conclusively trump nature, then we, too, could be anything we wished—sexually free, unneurotic, even happy—just by changing the cultural rules (Roth Pierpont: 2004 n.p.).

Nature or nurture? Boas’ point of view supported Margaret Mead’s findings in that his data about immigrant children in the US had opened minds to possibilities that were not covered by the contemporary scientific claims of hereditary limitations. Thus, it might boil down to the question of heredity or culture?

In the twenties, people were discovering that they lived in a culture … Although Boas argued for the recognition of plural cultures, he suggested not that all human achievements were equal … but that the range of intelligence and virtue ran the gamut about equally in every group. Thus, each person can be judged only as an individual. The challenge that remained was to demonstrate the power of culture in shaping lives. It was nature versus nurture with the scales reset: against our sealed-off genes, there was our accumulation of collective knowledge; in place of inherited learning, there was the social transmission of that knowledge from generation to generation. “Culture” was experience raised to scientific status. And it combined with biology to create mankind. Boas sent his students off to learn how the delicate balance worked. And then Margaret Mead came home and wrote a best-seller that turned American culture upside down (ibid.; my emphasis).

3.1 The Fundamental Difference Hypothesis

As a cultural phenomenon, whether language learning is effective and sustainable largely depends on interaction with the respective environment and (school) setting. But of similar importance is the question whether this learning is based on innate capacities (nature) or a result of carefully planned and effectively implemented teaching strategies (nurture). Especially for the purpose of an integrative CLIL methodology it is pertinent to differentiate, at the same time and if necessary, between children and adolescent language acquisition as it will have decisive consequences for any teaching strategy. The Universal Grammar theory and its derivatives had assumed an inherent biological feature as a linguistic mental module, whereas the Fundamental Difference Hypothesis (FDH) breaks a lance for external factors in language learning, especially the assumption that L2 learning contrasts with L1 development in two major aspects: SLA is nonconvergent and unreliable1.

(I) SLA is supposed to be nonconvergent, as domain-specific mechanisms available in early childhood—and part of the UG mental module—allegedly are not accessible for language learning in adulthood. Therefore, adults learning a foreign language need to rely on domain-general problem-solving skills, which develop during a maturation process and are part of dynamic cognitive skills. On the one hand, a fundamental difference between child-language acquisition and L2 learning is as much confirmed as, on the other hand, the existence of a UG—rich or minimalist in the sense of the aforementioned recursion. When Robert Bley-Vroman called this proposal the “Fundamental Difference Hypothesis” (1990), he argued that adult L2 learning would replace the domain-specific acquisition by his own native-language experience and a general abstract problem-solving system.

(II) L2 acquisition is deemed to be unreliable, as the development of knowledge and competence in a second—and further—language differs widely from learner to learner, his or her individual learning strategies and routines and very rarely ends with a nativelike performance. Overall, the answers to three questions are still contentious: Does a UG exist at all? If this is the case, is UG accessible to adult learners at least in part or as a “spin-off” from one’s own mother tongue and its lexis and grammar? When does the age of adult learners’ start? Frequently assumed to be the case for an individual to be above 18 years of age, the additional issue arises where adolescent learners, in other words pupils and younger students, can be placed. And if they are in a transition situation, how does this effect mental language modules (Chomsky) or general problem-solving skills?

In the light of conflicting evidence for positions that argue in favor of the availability or at least some role for UG in second language acquisition and the unresolved questions above, common sense and experience even point to the fact that older learners do not take longer to study another language successfully, but in fact acquire new languages often faster than their younger peers. What can be assumed from our “theory of practice” is threefold: some aspects of L2 features are not learnable from input but depend on former language learning experiences, some are not even part of the learner’s L1 and they are unlikely to have been taught by instructors, especially those competences linked to intercultural or transcultural knowledge.

As far as empirical differences between L1 and L2 (child and adult) acquisition and learning are concerned, a number of observations have been discussed (cf. Meisel: 192 ff, 200 f) and confirm the FDH in several ways. Adults learning a second language have, in contrast to children, a first language to relate to, so that their acquisition process—apart from being less uniform—follows different ways of input (see above) and can rely on prior knowledge and linguistic experiences. These differences are not a matter of controversy but establish themselves in multiple ways:

That the overwhelming majority of adult L2 learners does not attain native-like competences is the most crucial point but not the only one … A further particularity of L2 acquisition is that L2 learners exhibit a much larger range of variation, across individuals and within learners over time, than L1 children. This concerns the rate of acquisition as well as the use of target-deviant constructions and also the level of grammatical competence that they attain (ibid.: 194).

That first and second language acquisition differ fundamentally can also be inferred from the following observations: whereas a child’s brain is still developing, adults have a first language that guides their thinking and speaking; despite high levels of proficiency, L2 learners’ pronunciation mostly remains non-native; when an L2 learner’s proficiency reaches a certain plateau, fossilization occurs—and variations produced by non-native speakers are often similar or the same: failing to produce the third-person-singular “s” in English is a case in point. My conclusion is that an adult learner does not show the same but different potentials for (natural) language acquisition as a child, notwithstanding where the borderlines between a child, adolescent and adult are. Obviously, this would influence second language acquisition in the CLIL classroom where at the onset the typical age of students from Year 7 belongs to a transition period (cf.: Klewitz 2019).

In this light, a conclusion in the Guidebook for Bilingual Parents can be confirmed:

First and second language acquisition differ substantially, probably due to age-related changes of acquisition capacities … Although acquisition remains possible at all ages, some acquisition mechanisms become inaccessible in successive acquisition. Learners intuitively resort to others to replace them (Meisel: 200f).

Even if, like in this conclusion, certain principles of a UG are assumed to exist in some acquisition mechanisms, they might depend on other, external properties such as motivation, focus on study, communicative skills, cultural and age-related influences. Thus, it might yet be possible to reconcile nativist with nurture positions. Taking UG as a biological feature, it seems to be an “endowment” for language acquisition following certain phases in a child’s linguistic development—up to the age of four to five years. L2 principles, on the other hand, point at the abovementioned differences for older language learners. The solution might be to look at the transition from domain-specific mechanisms (nature) to domain-general modules (nurture) that allow for more conscious, effective and time-saving language studies, a quality especially important for CLIL and immersion programs. This transition would be in accordance with constructivist learning theories, observations from the concept of Visible Learning and not least from neurocognitive research, which testifies remarkable plasticity in the cognitive system throughout people’s lives.

Robert Vroman’s FDH tries to account for general characteristics of foreign language learning and his theory can consistently be connected with post-puberty learners, such as in most CLIL strands in schools. L2 acquisition in a classroom setting would resemble the process of general “adult” learning where there is no domain-specific module believed to exist and issues are the role of input, grammatical structures and the transfer of lexical categories. This is particularly important in CLIL programs where the transfer from subject-related concepts from L2 to L1 is one of the guiding learning objectives. Content-based teaching and learning demonstrates that processes of the language faculty—as in UG—are not exclusive to language and that “both native and subsequent languages draw on similar resources in acquisition and processing” (Herschensohn: 260). The “endowment” of the mental module or faculty in language acquisition allegedly declines with age in order to free up neural resources for other operations. Adolescents in CLIL settings would begin to rely instead on problem-solving skills to understand and handle content and consciously acquire L2 lexis and grammatical structures.