Reading and Writing to Learn: A Principled Approach to Practice in CLIL/Bilingual Classes

Abstract This article introduces a literacy programme based on a linguistic approach to teaching reading and writing across the curriculum, Reading to Learn (Rose, “Reading to Learn: Accelerating Learning”; Rose and Martin), with proven effectiveness for accelerating literacy development in both the L1 (e.g. Rose and Acevedo, among other studies) and for L2 in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) and programmes. Underlying the pedagogy are powerful theories of language, educational psychology and sociology which are applied to text analysis, lesson preparation and classroom interaction around reading and writing. Teachers starting to use the pedagogy see immediate results in students’ engagement and learning, and the written texts they produce. The pedagogy is based on a functional analysis of a text from the curriculum – its structure and the way its language makes meaning in that subject-, and on scaffolding/ modelling the processes of reading and writing with the whole class. In this paper, we offer a brief presentation of some strategies from the R2L pedagogy, and provide examples of text analysis, teacher preparation and application in state bilingual schools in Spain.