Pluriliteracies Teaching for Learning: conceptualizing progression for deeper learning in literacies development

Pluriliteracies Teaching for Learning (PTL) constitutes a relatively recent development in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL). This approach has been developed by a group of international experts (The Graz Group) in order to model and provide pathways for deeper learning across languages, disciplines and cultures by focusing on the development of disciplinary or subject specific literacies. We argue that deeper learning – defined as the successful internalization of conceptual content knowledge and the automatization of subject specific procedures, skills and strategies – rests on learners’ acquisition of disciplinary literacies. We posit that disciplinary literacies in turn only develop when learners actively engage in subject specific ways of constructing knowledge and when they are taught how to language their understanding appropriately and in an increasingly complex and subject appropriate manner. In this article, we will describe the theoretical underpinnings that inform our model to show how an understanding of the two key processes of deeper learning will aid to the conceptualization of learner progression in pluriliteracies development.