The development of academic
literacy in bilingual
settings: a corpus-based research
on the rise of
subordination in CLIL
Francisco Lorenzo
Jyväskylä, 2012
State of the art on bilingual CALP development
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It takes some 7 years to reach CALP in L1 and up to 10 if it is
through an L2. There are critical points in that development
(threshold level)
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The development of CALP in L2 consolidates L1 academic
literacy. (two-tipped iceberg) (learning to read // reading to learn)
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European Language Policies support languages across the
curriculum for L1 and L2 CALP development.
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Elaborated vs. Restricted code.
Deficits in Bilingual academic discourse
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Text extension is limited: Overgeneralizations in statements.
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Academic L2 discourse is poorer in details: provides less
information, shows lack of resources in some discourse functions
like interpreting facts, expressing a viewpoint or for clarifications or
expansion in comments.
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The verbal system is not well defined: complex time frames of
actions are simplified: results in studies are presented as
generalizations.
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Academic rhetorical functions are lacking: including academic
formulaic language, and lack of knowledge of genre structure.
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Structural errors: adverbs for adjectives, subject-verb agreement,
morphological simplification.
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Lexicon fares better than sytax.
State of the art on bilingual History discourse

Three composition stages: recording (giving accounts of past events); explaining
(factorial causation); appraising ( personal rendering and evaluation of facts).

Cronology construction: complex time framework

Lexical density (large amount of nouns and complex noun phrases)
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Abstraction: processes are packed up like abstract nouns or concepts ( they hated
other races – Racial hatred); They must act responsibilities

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Lexical metaphors (financial necrosis)
Grammar metaphors:

Embeddednes and recursion
Difficulties in the reception and production of
historical texts
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Poor understanding of historical notions: cause,
agency and multiple factorial causality. (Christie)
Genre simplification: students see texts as biographical
narratives (the work of men) not as abstract processes
(Llinares and Morton).
Cognitive strain: both in historical text production and
reception. Bottleneck hypotheses.
Failure to capture implicit meanings: agentivity in
coup d’etats (Oteiza)
Inability to provide a personal acount of facts:
students may have no voice.
Automated tools for academic discourse
assessment
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Bilingual Syntax Inventory (Krashen used it for
assessment purposes).
Coh-metrix: measures cohesion over time. Used for
content-based teaching.(for first language acquisition, for
level of text readability).
Syntactic Complexity Analyser: a) length of production
(clausal/sentential or T-unit), b)sentence complexity ratio
(clauses per sentences); c) amount of subordination; d)
amount of coordination ; larger syntactic production units
(complex nominals, verb phrases, etc).
Lexical Complexity Analyser: a) lexical density ; b)
lexical sophistication c) lexical
Syntactic Complexity in historical narratives of CLIL
intermediate and advanced students (SCI)
It happened because the
Unitet States started a war
with Pakistan, which
decided to fight back by
destroying these buildings.
The terrorist were taken to
a famous jail called
.
Guantanamo
Syntactic Complexity in historical narratives of CLIL
intermediate and advanced students (SCI)
The purpose of the war was finding
weapons of mass destruction, that
were supposed to be in possesion
of Iraq. That war, that lasted until
2009 made the USA spend a lot of
money in weapons and
infrastructure, apart from the
thousands of American soldiers that
died and all the civil
casualties,(most of them Iraquies).
Syntactic Complexity in historical narratives of CLIL
intermediate and advanced students (SCI)
Lexical Complexity in historical narratives of CLIL
intermediate and advanced students (LCI)
Main areas of lexical growth

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- Verb sophistication
(x7)
Type token ratio
(x1.5)
Root type token ratio
(x1.5)
Main areas of syntactic growth

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Complex nominal (x7)
Mean length of clause
(x1.5)
Clauses per sentence
(x 1.5)
Research questions
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How do L1 and L2 SCI and LCI correlate?
How do L1 and L2 SCI and LCI evolve over time?
What structural plateaus can be found (sentential
subordination)?
Can we detail threshold levels for historical functions; i.e:
recording, explaining and judging?
Can we find parallelisms in structural range and
academic functions?
Is there a natural order of acquisition in subordination as
in L1?
Applications
Language assessment
 Group formation
 Text grading

I
HISTORY GENRE
TEXTUAL SCOPE
Cosmogony
Biographical account:
story of someone else’s
life; narrative
Historical account:
naturalizing linearization
rendering the grand
narrative inevitable;
narrative
Factorial explanation:
complexifying of what
leads on to/from what;
expository
Chronicle
Treaty
KEY LINGUISTIC
FEATURE
Third person, setting in
time; third person; other
specific participants
Incongruent external
causal unfolding; third
person; mainly generic
participants; prosodic
judgement
Internal organization of
factors; factors externally
linked to outcome, generic
participants