Cafe CLIL - Making Language Visible with Dr Ruslana Westerlund
Summary
Café CLIL 17 - Making Language Visible is about a lot more than making language visible!
We are delighted to have valuable contributions from Dr Ruslana Westerlund who has just launched her new website - https://www.westerlundconsulting.com/ and also keeps a blog going - https://reclaimingthelanguage.blog/about/, and very recently (March 2026) co-authored (with Sally Humphrey and Olga Malin) and published a terrific resource for any teacher interested in the language of learning - "Building a Language Toolkit for Teachers: A Functional Approach".
There are so many references during this discussion that I’ve tried to make them all available within the recording, and include book references. Apologies if I missed anything, not only did we have a power cut, there was then an internet crash. Despite the hiccoughs, here is what I am sure you will find is a rich and informative discussion on language in education, systemic functional linguistics, the WIDA Standards and much much more.
Key takeaways for me were 1) the need to focus on the vertical progression of learning and plot language according to this progression rather than ‘package’ language horizontally from simple to complex. Phil then picks up on this point stressing the importance that ‘language serve the learning’. 2) Both Phil and I picked up many new things from this, not least was ‘summative genre’, a reference to knowing beforehand what the outputs or products are going to be and then planning backwards from that. 3) We need more focus on the language of learning in preservice subject teacher education, and Phil suggested that Systemic Functional Linguistics should be on the programme for all trainee language teachers.
We came to a natural point to stop when we began to talk about specific areas of the curriculum, and that also brings us to looking forward to a return visit from Ruslana to Café CLIL at some point when we will take on specific content items (resources, tasks, test items) and unpack them with more input from Ruslana. Can’t wait for that!