Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is an approach which offers many new challenges and opportunities in the field of language learning, particularly in the field of higher education. This paper describes a short programme developed conjointly by a physics lecturer and an English language teacher for use in a first-year university English course. Over a two-year period, the programme was tested and adapted in order to better achieve the physics teacher’s objectives; as the complexity of the science-content progressed (Chevallard, 1985), so too did the language skills required to achieve those objectives (Conseil de l’Europe, 2000). In this presentation, we argue that collaborative/cooperative programmes (Grangeat & al., 2009; Sanchez & Monod-Ansaldi, 2015; Sensevy & al., 2013) of this kind are a potential source of innovative teaching programmes producing stimulating learning environments which both strengthen learners’ language skills whilst supporting and reinforcing the learning objectives in their allied fields. To illustrate this, we will first present the programme theme: the impact of experimental protocols on the level of uncertainty in any given measurement. We will then outline the range of learning objectives explored in the programme, both in physics and in language learning, as well as describing how they were interlaced and integrated in the programme. To acquire the practical understanding necessary to construct this course cooperatively with the physics lecturer, the English language teacher acquired an interactional expertise (Collins, 2011); that is to say, a practical understanding of this field sufficient to interact with an expert and to conceive of resources in the domain, without actually being an expert who practices in the domain. The present form of the programme is the result of an ongoing analysis of the material produced during this two-year testing period, including student productions, cooperatively-designed teaching resources and records of the two teachers’ interactions. The Theory of Joint Action in Didactics (JATD) – (Gruson & al., 2012; Sensevy & Mercier, 2007; Sensevy, 1998, 2011) – is then used as a framework to model the didactic activity described using video data and transcribed sequences, thereby enabling its continued refinement as well as the identification of its essential components.

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