CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Language, Culture and Diversity
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1540211
This article is part of the Research TopicEnhancing Subject-literacy and 21st century competencies in CLIL/EMI and dual language education programsView all 3 articles
Conceptualising bi-and multilingual disciplinary literacies in CLIL: Insights from a European research network
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
- 2Department of English and American Studies, Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies, University of Vienna, Vienna, Vienna, Austria
- 3Autonomous University of Madrid, Madrid, Madrid, Spain
- 4University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Central Finland, Finland
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Educationalists across the world aim to prepare their students for the realities of post-school life; be that at university or in the workplace. Increasingly, the expectations on school leavers have diversified also with regard to their linguistic abilities and prominently include subject-specific or disciplinary literacies, i.e., showing "both deep knowledge of disciplinary content and keen understanding of disciplinary ways of making meaning" (Fang, 2012, p. 20). The global status of English has fostered the situation where subject-specific literacies are now not only needed in the main language of education, often the first language (L1) of students and teachers alike, but also in English as the strongest global lingua franca in both educational and professional environments. While this aim of achieving bi-or multilingual disciplinary literacies is implicitly present in all Content-and-Language-Integrated (CLIL) classrooms, the precise means of fostering such literacies vary across contexts. This article will outline work by the research network CLILNetLE (www.clilnetle.eu), which brings together over 240 individuals from 32 countries and is funded by the European Union.taking into account research into a) specific subjects (history, science, mathematics) b) challenges across school levels, including the expectations made in curricula and c) the influence of out-of-school and digital practices. To illustrate the multi-faceted nature of literacies, we will home in on one discursive aspect, i.e., Cognitive Discourse Functions (Dalton-Puffer, 2013, 2016) and exemplify their use across levels, subjects, curricula and digital practices. Drawing on this, we will outline how specific points of subject-specific literacies can and should be highlighted in teaching.
Keywords: Content and language integrated learning (CLIL), school-subjects, Secondary education, Disciplinary literacies, bilingual education
Received: 05 Dec 2024; Accepted: 02 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Huettner, Llinares and Nikula. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Julia Huettner, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.