Materials for Developing Cognitive Skills and Conceptual Knowledge in the Japanese Soft CLIL Classroom

This chapter discusses how to design teaching materials for Soft Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) lessons (topic/theme-based lessons taught by language teachers). The focus is placed on the intentional development of students’ thinking skills and conceptual knowledge while they are engaged in content and language-integrated tasks. After the introduction, the chapter first clarifies how L2 knowledge, topical knowledge, and cognitive mechanisms are intertwined and contribute to the whole L2 ability and skills (Purpura in The companion to language assessment. Wiley, New York, 2014). Then, to integrate cognition (thinking) and content (topic) into communication (language), two theoretical frameworks are introduced. One is Bloom’s revised taxonomy (Anderson et al. in A taxonomy for learning, teaching and assessing: a revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives. Longman, 2001), which is almost synonymous in the CLIL community with Cognition, one of the 4Cs (i.e., Content, Communication, Cognition, Culture) of CLIL (Coyle et al. CLIL: Content and language integrated learning. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010). The other is an innovative approach named unifying concepts made up of concept mining, concept defining, and concept framing techniques (Davis M in Concept-centred Soft CLIL: Uncovering concepts in EFL content. Soft CLIL and English language teaching: Understanding Japanese policy, practice, and implications. Routledge, London, 2022). Following the information on Japanese EFL contexts in general and its CLIL practices in particular, the chapter explains step-by-step procedures to develop Soft CLIL materials drawing on Bloom’s taxonomy and Davis’s framework. Examples of cognition-enhanced and concept-driven tasks in a science lesson are also presented. Although this chapter’s intended context is ELT classes in Japanese secondary schools, the concepts and principles of cognition-focused and concept-centred materials development should be applicable to any type of second language education regardless of students’ age, language level, and country, making teachers’ instruction creative with more choices available in their lesson design and students’ learning sustainable for newly acquired transferable knowledge and skills.