Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) has emerged as a prominent educational approach in multilingual and international educational contexts, fostering the parallel development of subject knowledge and language competence. Despite its growing implementation, a major challenge in CLIL pedagogy remains the need to make the relation between language and content development more transparent to both teachers and learners. This presentation explores the role of specially designed CLIL descriptors in making learning processes more visible and transparent within CLIL classrooms. CLIL descriptors (Moe et al, 2015; Daryai-Hansen et al., 2023) aim to map the cognitive operations realized through disciplinary discourse, while aligning with the proficiency levels of CEFR (2020). The descriptors build on Beacco (2010) and Linneweber-Lammerskitten’s discourse functions (2012) as well as on Dalton-Puffer’s framework of Cognitive Discourse Functions (2013) and provide a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between content, cognition and language in CLIL instructional contexts.
