As explained in previous Sections of this Deliverable, while all subject-teachers can easily identify the discipline-specific concepts they want their students to understand, many fail to appreciate that the discipline-specific language within which those concepts are embedded often sounds like a foreign language for those who are external to the particular disciplinary community of practice, i.e. learners. As such, like the learning of a foreign language, we must teach students disciplinary discourse, explicitly. And who is best positioned to teach students how to write and speak in ways which are acceptable to the chemistry community if not the chemistry teacher? That said, “a chemistry teacher is as interested in teaching word transformations as an English Foreign Language teacher is in teaching chemical transformations” (Ting, forthcoming). Thus “The Language Dilemma of Content Education” (Figure 1A): subject teachers simplify complex disciplinary discourse to help students understand complex discipline-specific concepts; i.e. subject-teachers ride down the semantic wave while explaining content (Figure 1B), but often forget to help their students ride back up the semantic wave, yet expect their students to then communicate disciplinary notions using discipline- appropriate discourse, which, even in L1, is like a foreign language to learners.

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