Disciplinary Perspectives Meet Disciplinary Literacies: A Heuristic Toolbox for Content-Language Integration

Abstract

Learning in any subject area involves learning to think and build knowledge in particular discipline-specific ways. This is a belief underscored by theory and research from several educational perspectives, although approaches to supporting development of disciplinary thinking vary. Examples of two such differing approaches are the perspective-based approach, and bi- and multilingual disciplinary literacies (BMDLs). While the perspective-based approach focuses on the way the organisation of subject content promotes disciplinary thinking, BMDLs address the communicative aspects of subject learning, in particular in multilingual classrooms. This paper argues that these two approaches can be viewed as complementary, and explores how bringing them together can help bridge the gap between content-oriented and communicative aspects of disciplinary learning. We approach this both theoretically and practically. We begin with introductions to both approaches, followed by an exploration of their conceptual complementarity. Taking biology as an example, we then present a heuristic toolbox in which subject-specific perspectives are combined with the BMDLs-related construct of cognitive discourse functions (CDFs) to support the design and selection of learning activities. On the basis of practical examples, we discuss how this toolbox can help teachers systematically connect the conceptual and communicative dimensions of their subject in multilingual learning contexts.