128141 FS FS Research Seminar I (2019W)

As in many European countries, the use of English as medium of teaching and learning in school-level content lessons has become a reasonably frequent element also in the Austrian school system. The goal behind this educational policy is to expand the learners’ command of English through the study of curricular content in subjects such as geography, history, art, or maths beyond what is achieved through EFL lessons alone. At the moment, one of the dominant research topics in this field concerns the question whether and how Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) enhances learners’ academic language skills, and how learners can best be supported in developing those subject-specific literacy competences in English which are necessary for acquiring subject-specific competences in (social) science subjects.

In this seminar, you will get involved in an ongoing research project dealing with CLIL history at upper-secondary level. We will empirically explore oral classroom interaction and written texts and a selection of research approaches will be introduced for this purpose. Students will form small groups, in which they will investigate lexical, syntactic, or pragmatic phenomena using the same data set. This research process will involve literature research, developing an initial categorization scheme, applying and adapting categories by means of detailed qualitative data coding and analysis and presenting methodological insights and salient findings. For the purpose of identifying and annotating instances of the phenomenon studied (e.g. subordination) in the data, students will be introduced to qualitative data analysis software (MaxQDA) and will work with the software independently and collaboratively for their joint presentation and their written research report.

This research seminar course combines mini-lectures, on- & offline assignments, reading-based group work and discussions, and group research work leading to a project report and a presentation.