The Principal Investigator of DisLitAs-CLIL, Ana Llinares, has just published her newest research on Thorsten Roelcke’s, Ruth Breeze’s, and Jan Engberg’s 2025 edited volume Specialised Communication: An International Handbook (vol. 1), in the chapter entitled Research and didactics of Specialized Communication: Content and Language Integrated Learning. You may find the abstract of this chapter below:
Students’ mastery of specialised language for the expression of content is key for their success in different academic disciplines but it also represents a challenge for teachers and students at different educational levels. This challenge is even bigger when these disciplines are learnt and taught in an additional language, as in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) programmes. While in the early days CLIL research mainly focused on the effects of CLIL programmes on students’ general competence in the target language, more recent studies have focused on CLIL as a pedagogical approach, thus exploring how content and language can be best taught, learnt, and assessed in integration across school/academic disciplines (history, biology, technology, …). Thus, CLIL research is gradually paying more attention to subject and general academic literacies. In this scenario, drawing on insights from research within the UAM CLIL research group (http://www.uam-clil.org), as well as on other studies, this chapter will showcase the role of Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) models, such as Genre Pedagogy or Appraisal Theory, and other related models, such as Legitimation Code Theory and Cognitive Discourse Functions, in the understanding of the role of language in the expression of content, teachers’ and students’ views of content and language integration, classroom practices, and collaborative work in CLIL.
UAM-CLIL research group 