Connecting Disciplinary and Linguistic Knowledge in Concept-Based Language Instruction

Disciplinary ways of thinking and communicating are connected, and this relationship presents challenges for concept-based language instruction that is embedded in specific disciplines. While some disciplinary concepts are simply relevant to the surrounding discourse, others play a fundamental role in organizing how experts think and communicate in their fields. These discourse-structuring concepts can play a useful role in discipline-embedded concept-based language instruction. This article illustrates how one such concept was integrated in the context of a legal writing course, using the cognitive linguistic framework of mental spaces and blending as a tool for representing the connections between this disciplinary concept and corresponding linguistic features through models that learners applied to dialogic discourse analysis tasks. The article illustrates how learners made sense of the models in completing these verbalization tasks and offers suggestions for integrating Concept-based Language Instruction in the Language for Specific Purposes classroom.