Conceptual Mediation through Translinguistic SCOBAs within C-BLI for Adult Learners of German

Abstract

This article discusses conceptual mediation through translinguistic SCOBAs: mediation tools that allow learners to move from their spontaneous linguistic knowledge to an organized, theoretical knowledge and to explain a given concept with respect to both the learners’ additional languages (ALs) and their L1. Translinguistic SCOBAs are used within the Integrated Plurilingual Approach (IPA) (Esteve et al. 2017), which draws on Concept-based Language Instruction (C-BLI). The IPA blends communicative and reflective activities in didactic sequences, in which conceptual mediation leads to translinguistic conceptualization. Conceptual mediation aims to help learners to appropriate concepts that are contrastively relevant. Translinguistic conceptualization unfolds through a gradual enrichment of the learners’ initial Orienting Basis of an Action (OBA) by means of four reflective activities: preliminary learner reflection, relevant contrastive analysis for raising conceptual awareness, joint completion and use of a systematizing translinguistic SCOBA, and retrospective learner reflection. This group of activities was developed within two IPA-based didactic sequences that were designed separately: (1) the grammatical concept ‘verbal aspect’ within personal narratives and (2) the socio-pragmatic concept ‘distancing’ within a set of interrelated oral and written genres. Each sequence was framed within a course of German as an AL taught at a different level (beginners and advanced) to adult learners with Spanish or Catalan as L1 and English as their first AL. The learners’ verbalized reflections during both sequences show that the reflective process of conceptual mediation with translinguistic SCOBAs, carried out through the four activities, proved useful in promoting perceived concept appropriation.