Diapositiva 1

1

The development of academic literacy in
bilingual
settings a corpus-based research on
the rise of
subordination in CLIL Francisco
Lorenzo Jyväskylä, 2012

2
State of the art on bilingual CALP development

• It takes some 7 years to reach CALP in L1 and up
  to 10 if it is through an L2. There are critical
  points in that development (threshold level)
• The development of CALP in L2 consolidates L1
  academic literacy. (two-tipped iceberg) (learning
  to read // reading to learn)
• European Language Policies support languages
  across the curriculum for L1 and L2 CALP
  development.
• Elaborated vs. Restricted code.

3
Deficits in Bilingual academic discourse

• Text extension is limited Overgeneralizations in
  statements.
• Academic L2 discourse is poorer in details
  provides less information, shows lack of
  resources in some discourse functions like
  interpreting facts, expressing a viewpoint or for
  clarifications or expansion in comments.
• The verbal system is not well defined complex
  time frames of actions are simplified results
  in studies are presented as generalizations.
• Academic rhetorical functions are lacking
  including academic formulaic language, and lack
  of knowledge of genre structure.
• Structural errors adverbs for adjectives,
  subject-verb agreement, morphological
  simplification.
• Lexicon fares better than sytax.

4
State of the art on bilingual History discourse

• Three composition stages recording (giving
  accounts of past events) explaining (factorial
  causation) appraising ( personal rendering and
  evaluation of facts).
• Cronology construction complex time framework
• Lexical density (large amount of nouns and
  complex noun phrases)
• Abstraction processes are packed up like
  abstract nouns or concepts ( they hated other
  races Racial hatred) They must act
  responsibilities
• Lexical metaphors (financial necrosis)
• Grammar metaphors
• Embeddednes and recursion

5
Difficulties in the reception and production of
historical texts

• Poor understanding of historical notions cause,
  agency and multiple factorial causality.
  (Christie)
• Genre simplification students see texts as
  biographical narratives (the work of men) not as
  abstract processes (Llinares and Morton).
• Cognitive strain both in historical text
  production and reception. Bottleneck hypotheses.
• Failure to capture implicit meanings agentivity
  in coup detats (Oteiza)
• Inability to provide a personal acount of facts
  students may have no voice.

6
Automated tools for academic discourse assessment

• Bilingual Syntax Inventory (Krashen used it for
  assessment purposes).
• Coh-metrix measures cohesion over time. Used for
  content-based teaching.(for first language
  acquisition, for level of text readability).
• Syntactic Complexity Analyser a) length of
  production (clausal/sentential or T-unit),
  b)sentence complexity ratio (clauses per
  sentences) c) amount of subordination d) amount
  of coordination larger syntactic production
  units (complex nominals, verb phrases, etc).
• Lexical Complexity Analyser a) lexical density
  b) lexical sophistication c) lexical

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Syntactic Complexity in historical narratives of
CLIL intermediate and advanced students (SCI)

• It happened because the Unitet States started a
  war with Pakistan, which decided to fight back by
  destroying these buildings. The terrorist were
  taken to a famous jail called Guantanamo.

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Syntactic Complexity in historical narratives of
CLIL intermediate and advanced students (SCI)

The purpose of the war was finding weapons of
mass destruction, that were supposed to be in
possesion of Iraq. That war, that lasted until
2009 made the USA spend a lot of money in weapons
and infrastructure, apart from the thousands of
American soldiers that died and all the civil
casualties,(most of them Iraquies).
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Syntactic Complexity in historical narratives of
CLIL intermediate and advanced students (SCI)
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Lexical Complexity in historical narratives of
CLIL intermediate and advanced students (LCI)
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Main areas of lexical growth

• - Verb sophistication (x7)
• Type token ratio (x1.5)
• Root type token ratio (x1.5)

12
Main areas of syntactic growth

• Complex nominal (x7)
• Mean length of clause (x1.5)
• Clauses per sentence (x 1.5)

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Research questions

• How do L1 and L2 SCI and LCI correlate?
• How do L1 and L2 SCI and LCI evolve over time?
• What structural plateaus can be found (sentential
  subordination)?
• Can we detail threshold levels for historical
  functions i.e recording, explaining and
  judging?
• Can we find parallelisms in structural range and
  academic functions?
• Is there a natural order of acquisition in
  subordination as in L1?

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Applications

• Language assessment
• Group formation
• Text grading

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