Multilinguismo, CLIL e innovazione didattica - Libera Università di ...

Y.L. Teresa Ting
lish words are spelt. In fact, despite years of ‘learning English’, Italian university
students still produce whit rather than with: this is surely not for want of
input since with is ca. the 16 th most frequent English word 2 .
At first glance, Ex 2a seems to be a simple ‘correct the language’ exercise.
However, since there are a number of mistakes, learners must re-read each
sentence several times to identify all the mistakes that need correcting. This
‘mere’ language activity thus covertly impregnates learners with the content
lexis they will need to language, explain and discuss their experimental observations
and thus adopt proper community discourse (Wenger 1998). However,
since the content is still unfamiliar and the content-cognitive-demand (CCD)
is thus high, the language supporting this unknown content is easy: the language-cognitive-demand
(LCD) is low. Figure 2 schematizes this complementary
equilibrium between the content-cognitive-demand and the languagecognitive-demand.
Since a FL is used for acquiring new content, it is easy to
design CLIL tasks which explicitly focus on language but which implicitly
lead learners to content-knowledge. This process of scaffolding unfamiliar
content upon familiar language equilibrates between CCD and LCD, and
achieves what Coyle et al. (2010, 95) call “the content and language familiarity
and novelty continuum [whereby] language remains accessible as new concepts
are introduced”.
High CCD : Low LCD
High LCD : Low CCD
2 http://www.world-english.org/english500.htm
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