Abstract:

CLIL/EMI teaching at tertiary level give an inordinate amount of attention to content-specific expressions, terms and concepts (Smit, 2010) as well as to discipline-specific language functions, genres, usages, linguistic repertoires and the need to cover a vast array of oral and written communicative situations (Breidbach, 2003). There is a conceptual continuum that links to a communication continuum (Halbach, Schuck and Ting, 2015) as part of this cognitively demanding learning environment. So, one interesting question for CLIL/EMI lecturers is how to successfully link up pedagogies of specific subjects in Higher Education with pedagogies of language learning (for CLIL) and learning through a foreign language in EMI.

Considering the large numbers of technical terms in specialised texts (oral multimedia, written, etc.), lecturers need to facilitate their learning and this can be done through the co-creation of bilingual glossaries of technical terms, prepared by both the language and the content teacher. Although glossaries are never an end in themselves, this paper wishes to demonstrate their use as scaffolding for both content and language learning.

This paper describes a participatory student-centred collaborative CLIL /EMI approach that involved engineering students and Art/Fashion Design students in a Portuguese Higher Education polytechnic. In this approach monolingual and bilingual glossaries were used as scaffolded learning that motivated and was felt as relevant by the students involved for their future professional careers. The two different approaches to monolingual and bilingual, paper or digital, glossaries of technical terms are discussed in terms of integration of content and language learning aims, shared co-constructed learning tools for students that reinforce both their language and content knowledge, and integration of students into disciplinary discourse as plurilingual users of academic disciplines (when Erasmus students integrated classes).

Keywords:

CLIL, EMI, Bilingual Glossaries, Industrial Engineering, Art/Fashion Design.