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In contrast to other types of code-switching in bilingual education, mediation tasks create fictitious but still realistic situations in which only the mediator has the necessary linguistic and cultural reference systems at their disposal to communicate with interlocutors of different languages. This specific communicative situation may provide educational potential to foster linguistic and conceptual learning, with the aim of developing students' literacy in two subjects (doppelte Fachliteralität). Nevertheless, the potential of mediation tasks has not been empirically investigated so far: this forms the starting point of our contribution. After a brief introduction outlining the characteristics of the use of mediation tasks in monolingual foreign language classes and in bilingual CLIL classes, a theoretical model is presented. The model enables us to plan language mediation tasks in bilingual (history) classes and to investigate students' use of such tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]