Scoping Review of Disciplinary Literacy Development in Content and Language Integrated Learning

Abstract

Disciplinary literacy development is an emerging issue in multilingual education, where Content and Language Integrated Learning is a contributing tool. Numerous studies investigated disciplinary literacy in CLIL from different perspectives, locations, and backgrounds. This systematic review aims to synthesize and identify the research gap to understand the central phenomenon better. Evident from the results, included studies employed diverse methodologies such as exploratory studies, design-based research, longitudinal case studies, and cross-sectional studies. Moreover, research instruments included oral and written tasks, video-recorded lessons, competency-based and practical activity tasks, reflective journals, and portfolios. The selected studies utilized Cognitive Discourse Functions, Uptake, Systemic Functional Linguistics, Genre-based pedagogy, and Pluraliteracies as primary theoretical constructs. The novelty is that this is the first paper to conduct a systematic review of disciplinary literacy in CLIL, where recommendations for further contextual research are provided. A novel contribution of this systematic review is the integration of quantitative and qualitative data analysis when presenting the synthesis of the selected articles. This paper tabulates the selected articles’ key characteristics, forming a groundwork for further research. Correspondingly, the study concludes with the limitations and scholars’ assumptions. Keywords: disciplinary literacy, CLIL, multilingual education, systematic review, cognitive discourse functions, language across curriculum, subject-specific vocabulary, content education