Developing secondary students' academic literacies with hybrid genres in CLIL materials design

Abstract

Many Chinese-speaking students in Hong Kong, especially those with rudimentary English skills, struggle academically since core subjects (such as science) are taught in their second language, English. According to the Sydney School's genre theory, the many academic genres utilized in these content areas are new to the students since they differ from the genres they typically encounter (such as narratives and stories). This study attempts to hybridize these two types of genre to help students transition from their comfortable everyday genres to the challenging school academic genres across different disciplines, thereby scaffolding and developing their academic literacies in English. This is done to address the challenges faced by the students and to advance the current framework of genre theory.

Adopting a Designed-Based Research (DBR) approach, the researcher collaborated with English teachers from a secondary school in Hong Kong to design various sets of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) materials where the notion “hybrid genres” is developed and incorporated as a key multimodal scaffolding element in the materials. These materials were then implemented in the classroom and evaluated their effectiveness in developing students’ English academic literacies. With thematic analysis of multiple data sources including questionnaires, tests, interviews, lesson observations, professional meeting minutes and students’ work, development in students’ English academic literacies was observed regarding (1) applying subject-specific vocabulary in context; (2) constructing sentences with academic functions; (3) paragraphing disciplined texts. Results drawn upon the processes of the study illuminate the scaffolding power of “hybrid genres” that derived from their multimodal nature, and suggest pedagogical implications of integrating “hybrid genres” into across different disciplines materials. Equally importantly, findings based on the prototyping and intervention cycles of the materials design processes suggest four core CLIL materials design principles that are tied to a proposed CLIL module planning framework. In this proposed CLIL module planning framework, various scaffolding strategies are systematically organised and connected through employing a pedagogical framework, namely the Multimodal-Textualization Cycle (MEC). Along with various challenges, these scaffolding strategies emerged and refined during the different iterative cycles of the study, which are found to be useful and necessary for developing students’ academic literacies.