Beyond CLIL Pluriliteracies Teaching for Deeper Learning

As was noted in Chapter 2, few studies have focussed on the role of language teachers rather than the role of language in bilingual settings and their collaboration with subject specialists (Dale et al., 2018a). In this chapter we challenge the assumption that the language teacher’s principle contribution to CLIL contexts is expertise in language teaching and learning to support subject disciplines. This is not to minimise the importance of subject and language teacher collaboration – in some contexts this is extremely successful and pedagogically beneficial. However, we suggest an alternative which positions the language teacher as a subject specialist with a significant contribution to make in developing the pluriliteracies landscape. We explore ways in which the modern-, foreign- or second-language teacher (referred to where appropriate throughout this chapter as ‘language teacher’) can reframe their ‘subject’ as one which has increasing importance and value in our ‘post-truth’ world, not only in bilingual classrooms but also in monolingual contexts where the timetabled ‘language lesson’ provides an inclusive space for developing a critical understanding of languages, cultures and literatures.