Operationalising Pluriliteracies in a Lesson Planning Tool for Vocational CLIL Teachers

Whilst researchers agree that the integration of content and language goals is the operative principle behind any successful CLIL programme, there is an ongoing debate over how we can best conceptualise this integration for practical use. A promising way of integrating content and language goals in CLIL teaching is foregrounding the subject/pluriliteracies skills relevant to the respective CLIL subjects, and using them as a guide to offer targeted language support and multimodal scaffolding measures. Yet the content teachers typically involved in CLIL programmes in Austria are seldom trained in subject literacy education or foreign language teaching methodology, which makes the task of translating a content and language integrated model into CLIL practice especially demanding. This becomes even more challenging at Austrian technical colleges, where CLIL programmes typically focus on highly specialised technical content subjects in which cognitive demand is high in terms of both content and language. To support teachers at technical colleges in implementing an integrated CLIL model, this project aims at developing a CLIL lesson planning tool that operationalises subject literacy for the context of technical colleges. Following a design-based research (DBR) approach, the tool is designed in collaboration with two novice CLIL teachers and tested in their respective subjects recycling technology and control engineering. Both the process and the outcome of this project offer new insights into CLIL lesson planning and vocational CLIL in general. The lesson planning tool itself holds the potential to improve CLIL practice in the often-neglected context of vocational CLIL, thus bridging the gap between theory and practice.