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This overview of seven years of research on language learning and teaching in Austria reflects a period of steady growth for the language teaching and learning research community, a development due to a national policy agenda aiming for a stronger research base in teacher education. The target languages of the teaching and learning processes investigated are primarily German, English, French, Italian, Spanish as well as several Slavic languages, reflecting the geographical, sociolinguistic and language policy situation of this increasingly multilingual country. This multilingualism means there are clearly many more first languages (L1s) than only German involved in the learning situations investigated. While all the studies reviewed here illustrate research driven by a combination of local and global concerns in connection with different theoretical frameworks, some specific clusters of research interest emerge. These are: societal and individual multilingualism, language education policy, language teacher education, language(s) in other subjects, early language learning, language acquisition and learning, literature and culture, testing and standardisation, digital media, and teaching materials.

Classrooms the world over are full of people who, for different reasons, are learning additional languages and/or are studying through languages that are not their first. Gaining insight into such contexts is complicated for researchers and practitioners alike by the myriad of contextual variables that come with different implementations and make comparison and generalization a tricky business. We welcome Cenoz et al.'s (2013) article as an important contribution to the debate on how best to tackle this problem. In this Forum piece we would like to, however, redress the balance on two issues: the fact that terminologies have histories and the emphases on the research agenda suggested for future Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) research.

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is one of the most dynamic pedagogic trends in language teaching in Europe, and yet, the enthusiasm with which this innovation is implemented by stakeholders and "made a success" is not fully understood. In this paper we argue for an investigation of CLIL implementation as a form of extended language policy, which relates language management, practice and beliefs, and so expands the notion of policy well beyond a top-down legislation. In this contribution, the suggested centrality of beliefs to CLIL policy analysis will be shown by a detailed investigation into the lay theories of teachers and learners involved in CLIL instruction in Austrian upper secondary colleges of technology, which traditionally attract students considered as relatively unsuccessful foreign language learners. The data consist of 48 in-depth interviews with teachers and students in this setting, covering a range of teacher specialisations and of student abilities. The discursive and content analysis of these interviews shows clear clusters of beliefs relating to language learning, the effects and benefits of CLIL and to the construction of success regarding CLIL. Findings suggest that the strength of beliefs and the relative absence of language management result in a construction of CLIL and of CLIL success that is partly at odds with those of experts or policy-makers, but which is linked directly to local CLIL practices. Issues arising of these mismatches are discussed. (Contains 3 notes.)

Using a pragmatic framework, this paper examines how directives are performed by teachers and students in Finnish and Austrian CLIL classrooms, that is settings where a foreign language (in this case English) is used as the medium of instruction in non-language subjects such as history or chemistry. We explore how interpersonal aspects of communication get realized in the performance of directives, and the way contextual factors such as the object of directives (information/action) or the type of classroom register (instructional/regulative) affect speakers' directness choices. The findings show that both these contextual factors interact systematically with speakers' use of directives. For example, demands for information seem to be fully sanctioned by the educational context and are therefore normally performed directly by both teachers and students whereas demands for action require more interpersonal work, evidenced by the more indirect strategies used. Moreover, while there are student demands for information in both instructional and regulative register, students' right to perform directives for action seems to be restricted to regulative register. Our results show how the specific conditions of classroom discourse affect the language environment in CLIL classrooms and we argue this should be taken into account when formulating language goals for this educational approach.

From the point of view of AILA's research network "CLIL and Immersion Education: Applied Linguistic Perspectives" this volume finally does justice to a strand of interest that has been part of the network from its inception. As the editors rightly point out in the introduction, ReN events and publications during the network's first period have focused more strongly on school-level education than on the post-secondary sector, and so it is truly timely that this volume of "AILA Review" should redress the balance. In combination, the contributions in this collection weave a multifaceted picture of the European experience with regard to the ongoing surge in English-medium university teaching, ranging from individual courses to entire curricula being administered in that language. As one reviews the motives and aims which institutions and stakeholders appear to connect with the introduction of English-medium teaching one can, the author wishes to argue, discern three broad types of motivation: (1) Strategic; (2) Pedagogical; and (3) Substantial. The contributions to this volume furnish examples for all of these motives even though they may not be considered equally important by the participants in each context. Despite the special dynamism present in European higher education today, the author would not like to ignore the concerns shared across the AILA Research Network as a whole. The fact that researchers with different contextual orientations have been interacting and cooperating profitably and successfully since 2006 is witness enough that there is a significant number of common concerns where a shared discourse helps to clarify the issues and to sharpen theoretical and methodological notions. Subject-matter teaching in English raises highly relevant questions regarding the role of English as an educational lingua franca, a subject which the contributions in this volume also begin to explore. But the practices described in the studies are intriguing to applied linguists not only in terms of their theoretical and empirical research interests. They also affect them on a very direct professional level: subject-matter teaching in English transgresses well-established disciplinary and system-inherent borders creating considerable insecurities along the way.

Embedded in a Systemic Functional understanding of education as an initiation into knowledge structures and specific activities, both of which are fundamentally mediated by language, this paper addresses one of the critical concerns around CLIL: a possible mismatch between students' cognitive level and their L2 proficiency. The focus is on acts of classifying, comparing and contrasting facts, objects, phenomena, abstract ideas and concepts. Such cognitive and verbal actions are key in the construction of specialist knowledge, having been bundled in an umbrella cognitive discourse function (CDF) categorize. To operationalize this CDF, we develop a conceptual map through an exploratory, data-driven analysis of an oral learner corpus in L2 English and L1 Spanish on science and history topics collected in primary bilingual schools in Madrid. We also use SFL tools to examine lexico-grammatical choices which students employ to realize categorize across the two subjects and languages. The analysis shows that students encounter a range of difficulties, both conceptual and linguistic, when forming complete and appropriate categorizations in both languages. The results obtained across subjects reveal clear subject-specific tendencies in how categorizing is carried out: comparing seems to be a defining figure of thought in history while classifications were predominant in science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) has received a considerable amount of research interest lately, its increasing popularity as an approach to teaching content subjects in a foreign language requires concerted investigation that reflects and recognises its fundamentally contextualised nature. In this contribution, we sketch various tasks that require localised, often action research, covering a range of areas highly relevant to CLIL realities, but so far underrepresented in the literature. These are, firstly, policy issues, comprising policy statements as well as stakeholders’ perceptions of CLIL and its success; secondly, classroom discourse as the prime site for the investigation of CLIL practices and their implications for the learning process; and, thirdly, classroom pedagogy, with the focus on potential differences between CLIL and non-CLIL settings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]