Interaction strategies in english-medium instruction

According to well-established studies in bilingual and content-based education, the use of a second language to teach school subjects such as biology and geography can foster L2 acquisition through exposure to contextualized input and a motivating learning environment.
This book investigates English-medium instruction in secondary school settings in Italy from the perspective of spoken interactions which take place between teachers and learners. A quantitative and qualitative analysis of the repair trajectories and the feedback forms produced by teachers applying the CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) approach, together with an analysis of the output produced by learners, provides insight in the conversational patterns which may arise in classrooms where English-medium instruction is applied, with particular reference to negotiation of meaning. The corpus collected for the study includes samples of input by teachers who have different linguistic and methodological backgrounds and serves as a starting point for considerations on the issue of teacher training in CLIL projects in Italy. The results show how the professional profiles of teachers can affect the amount of formal correction in negative feedback and the production of conversational moves which encourage learners to take part in interaction.
This book will be interesting not only for applied linguists and researchers in second language acquisition, but also for foreign language teachers who wish to get acquainted with the dynamics of CLIL interactions.

Cristina Mariotti is a Post-doc research fellow at the University of Pavia and she teaches English at the course of Communication Studies there. Her interests concern mainly second language acquisition, the teaching of English as a foreign language, and the study of English for specific purposes. She is the author of contributions published in national and international journals.