Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is an educational innovation involving the learning of a subject through a foreign language, frequently English. Whilst CLIL belongs to EU Language Policy (e.g. European Commission, 2003), it is often implemented within the subject timetable. Defined as a methodology (Marsh, 2002; Mehisto, et al. 2008) the extensive use of language teaching techniques in the subject classroom combined with the foreign language mediation of both teaching and learning (Coyle, 2006) has significant implications for the pedagogic principles behind this approach. In a foreign language mediated environment, learners may neither have the everyday language to formulate prior knowledge nor to jointly construct their understanding. In addition, teachers working through a foreign-language may find their ability to apply pedagogical content knowledge significantly reduced. The implications of this for apprenticeship into the cultural ways of thinking and speaking in a subject community, and for participation in the talk-based educational culture of a classroom require careful consideration as CLIL accelerates across Europe.

With language described as “the most ubiquitous, flexible and creative of the meaning-making tools available” (Mercer and Littleton, 2007:2) a foreign language mediated environment highlights even more urgently the need to understand and use this tool effectively.   Language is the primary tool in the pedagogic repertoire of the teacher and the learning repertoire of pupils, the tool of engagement between learner and teacher, learner with subject, learner with learner and “one of the materials from which the child constructs a way of thinking” (Edwards and Mercer, 1987: 20). Furthermore, the foreign-language mediation of teaching and learning in CLIL “leads to more intensive interaction between teachers and learners” (Baetens Beardsmore, 2008:9) putting even greater demand on language use in a context defined by the limitations of its language resources.

Drawing on sociocultural theories of learning this research seeks to suggest a conceptual model of the different talk-types to support the integrated learning of subject matter through a foreign language. Recognising the different talk-types demanded in the educational discourse of the classroom and apprenticeship into the expert community is one step towards the development of appropriate teaching-learning repertoires (de Graaff, et al. 2007).

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