Thematic patterns, Cognitive Discourse Functions, and genres

As CLIL is developing into an established discipline, it is timely to deepen the theorizing of integration of content and language, particularly in CLIL assessment. To illustrate the challenges, a representative example of a high-stakes CLIL biology assessment task in Hong Kong will first be presented. An Integrative Model for CLIL will then be proposed and applied to illuminate the demands of the assessment task and diagnose a sample student performance. The Integrative Model is developed by integrating genre and register theory (Martin & Rose, 2008), Cognitive Discourse Functions (Dalton-Puffer, 2013), thematic patterns theory (Lemke, 1990), Concept-and-Language-Mapping (CLM) Approach (He & Lin, 2019) and translanguaging/trans-semiotizing theories (Garcia & Li, 2014; Lin, 2019). To further illustrate the utility of the Model, a range of possible assessment-for-learning (Black et al., 2003) CLIL task examples designed by the authors will be presented. The article will conclude with implications for CLIL pedagogy and assessment.