It is now widely recognized among educators that explicit attention to language is necessary in order to optimize both language and content learning in situations, such as CLIL, where learners, teachers or both operate in a second language. However, the requirement of attention to language sits uneasily with the fact that content-subject specialist teachers frequently feel unprepared to think and operate in linguistic dimensions. In an attempt to create a conceptualisation that would speak to subject teachers in terms that are meaningful to them from within their own subjects, a Construct of Cognitive Discourse Functions (henceforth CDFs) has been proposed. This construct is theoretically founded in both educational curriculum theory and linguistic pragmatics and consists of a seven-fold categorization of verbalizations which express acts of thinking about subject matter in the classroom (CLASSIFY, DEFINE, DESCRIBE, EVALUATE, EXPLAIN, EXPLORE, REPORT). As the theoretical background of the CDF Construct has been discussed at length elsewhere (Dalton-Puffer 2013, 2016), it will be presented only briefly at the outset of this article. The main purpose of this contribution is to report on steps taken towards an empirical validation of the CDF Construct. A total of four smaller-scale studies each focusing on the classroom discourse in one subject (biology, physics, economics, history) will be surveyed in order to find answers to the questions of whether CDFs actually occur in classroom interaction and if they do, which and to what extent. Comparisons to a small complementary study on a set of EFL lessons will be made where appropriate. Results show that CDFs are indeed a staple of teaching and learning in classroom-based education but are in no way equally distributed. Also, they are almost never the object of conscious attention. As a number of further questions remain yet to be answered on the way towards empirical validation of a fully articulated CDF Construct, these will be discussed in the conclusion of the article.

Die vorliegende Studie soll veranschaulichen, wie Design-Based Research (DBR) im transdisziplinären Raum, der für CLIL bezeichnend ist, dazu beitragen kann, Theorie und Praxis besser zu verschränken. Diese Studie stellt den ersten Forschungszyklus eines Dissertationsprojekts dar, welches die Integration von Sprachund Fachlernen im englischsprachigen Geschichtsunterricht der Sekundarstufe II näher beleuchtet. Genauer gesagt versucht dieses Forschungsprojekt Design Prinzipien für CLIL Lehr-und Lernmaterialien zu identifizieren, welche sowohl die Entwicklung fachlicher Kompetenzen als auch sprachlicher Kompetenzen fördern. Zu diesem Zweck bedient sich diese Studie an Dalton-Puffers (2013) Konstrukt kognitiver Diskursfunktionen (CDFs), welches sieben zentrale akademische Sprachfunktionen definiert und sehr eng mit historischen Kompetenzen verbunden zu sein scheint. Im Zuge der Studie entwickelten ein Team bestehend aus Lehrperson und Forscherin systematisch CDF-basierte, kompetenzorientierte Materialien, welche im regulären Unterricht der Lehrperson angewandt und kontinuierlich evaluiert wurden. Zur Evaluierung dienten Unterrichtsbeobachtung, Interviews mit Schülerinnen und Lehrperson sowie schriftliche Aufgabenstellungen. Die Ergebnisse dieses ersten Forschungszykluses suggerieren, dass SchülerInnen oftmals nicht bewusst ist, wie Sprach-und Fachlernen verbunden sein kann, obwohl sie durchaus Probleme damit haben, komplexere, geschichtliche Inhalte auszudrücken. Im Allgemeinen reagierten die Lehrperson und auch die Schülerinnen durchwegs positiv auf die durchgeführte Intervention, sie zeigten aber auch Raum für Verbesserung auf, wie etwa eine durchgängigere und ausgewogenere Verflechtung von Sprach-und Fachlernen.

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This paper combines the perspectives of applied linguistics and history education in order to explore the viability of a genuinely non-binary pedagogy for content and language integration. Cognitive Discourse Functions (CDFs) are mapped against the model of historical competences underlying the current Austrian secondary history curriculum. The theoretical analysis shows the performance of CDFs as central to the constitution of historical competences. For the empirical part of the study, two complete didactic units on the topic of the Industrial Revolution were recorded, and oral and written utterances by students were analysed both in terms of CDF use and historical competences. The results confirm a significant connection between competences and CDFs. We argue that some explicit attention to CDFs and the linguistic resources necessary for their competent verbalization could significantly enhance the subject literacy level of Austrian CLIL history learners in both oral and written production.

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