Investigating subject-specific literacy in a nutrition coursein a Turkish vocational high school

The present study investigated how the students and the teacher learn/teaches the specific content based on Cognitive Discourse Functions (CDF) in learners' mother language (L1) in a vocational high school. This small-scale case study was conducted to examine the "Maternal and Child Health lesson" / "Baby and Child Nutrition" class presented by the content teacher based on the framework of CDF proposed by Dalton-Puffer (2016). Besides understanding how the students gain subject specific literacy in their departmental courses, the study enables me, as a teacher of English language, to plan a CLIL lesson by focusing on the content that the students have already been familiar with in their L1 and the language forms which they use to express their knowledge related to the content area. Thus, it is necessary to observe what the students learn, how they construct the content knowledge and how the teacher uses the materials in the real classroom environment. Furthermore, with the aim of investigating the coursebook, the academic language of the coursebook is analyzed, taking into account Hyland's (2005a) metadiscourse features. Besides, the video records of the lectures are analyzed qualitatively to examine the use of CDF constructs in the classroom interaction and finally the individual interview with the content teacher and focus group interviews with the students are reviewed based on the descriptive analysis method. The findings of the study display that the students and the teacher co-construct the content knowledge with the use of CDF constructs and metadiscourse functions in Turkish Academic Language.