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It is now widely recognized among educators that explicit attention to language is necessary in order to optimize both language and content learning in situations, such as CLIL, where learners, teachers or both operate in a second language. However, the requirement of attention to language sits uneasily with the fact that content-subject specialist teachers frequently feel unprepared to think and operate in linguistic dimensions. In an attempt to create a conceptualisation that would speak to subject teachers in terms that are meaningful to them from within their own subjects, a Construct of Cognitive Discourse Functions (henceforth CDFs) has been proposed. This construct is theoretically founded in both educational curriculum theory and linguistic pragmatics and consists of a seven-fold categorization of verbalizations which express acts of thinking about subject matter in the classroom (CLASSIFY, DEFINE, DESCRIBE, EVALUATE, EXPLAIN, EXPLORE, REPORT). As the theoretical background of the CDF Construct has been discussed at length elsewhere (Dalton-Puffer 2013, 2016), it will be presented only briefly at the outset of this article. The main purpose of this contribution is to report on steps taken towards an empirical validation of the CDF Construct. A total of four smaller-scale studies each focusing on the classroom discourse in one subject (biology, physics, economics, history) will be surveyed in order to find answers to the questions of whether CDFs actually occur in classroom interaction and if they do, which and to what extent. Comparisons to a small complementary study on a set of EFL lessons will be made where appropriate. Results show that CDFs are indeed a staple of teaching and learning in classroom-based education but are in no way equally distributed. Also, they are almost never the object of conscious attention. As a number of further questions remain yet to be answered on the way towards empirical validation of a fully articulated CDF Construct, these will be discussed in the conclusion of the article.

School-level learners who study curricular content in a language that is not their first require active support in their development of academic language, ideally in conjunction with working on said content. However, content teachers naturally orient towards the learning goals formulated for their respective subjects, while language teachers do not routinely consider them. This situation could be resolved if a zone of convergence between content and language pedagogies could be established. In this paper I argue that cognitive discourse functions (CDFs) constitute such a zone of convergence as the cognitive processes involving subject-specific facts, concepts and categories are verbalized in recurring and patterned ways during the event of co-creating knowledge in the classroom. While numerous publications make reference to such discourse functions, no coherent and theoretically explicit model of CDFs exists to date. The main purpose of this paper is, therefore, to introduce such a model that is theoretically explicit and conceptually anchored in both education and linguistics. Initial evidence for the empirical grounding of the construct is presented and suggestions are made for the further elaboration, consolidation and use of the CDF Construct introduced in this article.

Under the label of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) the teaching of curriculum subjects through the medium of a foreign language has become a widely accepted feature in mainstream education systems in Europe and other parts of the world. After contextualizing its subject matter in CLIL research as a whole, this article focuses on research into classroom discourse. In order to unravel the complexities involved, three different takes on CLIL classroom discourse are discussed as an evidence-base for (a) language learning, (b) language use and social-interactional aspects of L2-interaction, and (c) processes of knowledge construction in and through a second or foreign language. The article concludes with an outline of requirements for further research in the area.

In the context of pronunciation teaching, the relevance of a standard native accent as teaching model and norm needs to be reconsidered in view of the learners’ attainment as well as their wishes and expectations. In order to test attitudes to native and non‐native varieties of English in Austria, a language attitude study was undertaken with 132 university students of English. In response to the modified matched‐guise test, the subjects evaluated three native accents RP (Received Pronunciation), near‐RP and GA (General American) and two Austrian non‐native accents of English. The results confirm the low status the non‐native accents have amongst their users and the overall preference for the three native accents. Generally, the respondents rate the accent best with which they have become familiar at school and/or during stays in English‐speaking countries. Reflecting historical and geopolitical circumstances, the majority of the subjects support RP as their favourite model of pronunciation. Furthermore, the study sheds light on the importance of personal exposure to English in its native environments. While the evaluations of the students with EFL experience reflect rather rigid stereotypes, those students who have spent some time in English‐speaking countries reveal more individualized, situation‐linked attitudes.