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in Language Education and Research
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APPLYING THE 4Cs FRAMEWORK IN A
COURSE ON PROBLEM SOLVING SKILLSLuke Rowland
Corresponding author: luke-r@kanda.kuis.ac.jp
ISSN 2187-4972

Publication date: February, 2013

To cite this article
Rowland, L. (2013). Applying the 4Cs framework in a course on
problem solving. Working Papers in Language Education andResearch, 1 (1) 84 - 93.

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Working	  Papers	  in	  Language	  Education	  and	  Research,	  Vol.	  1	  No.	  1.	  February	  2013,	  84	  -­‐	  93	  APPLYING THE 4Cs FRAMEWORK IN A COURSE ON
PROBLEM SOLVING SKILLSLuke Rowland
Kanda University of International Studies
The 4Cs framework (Coyle, Hood & Marsh 2010) describes an approach todesigning and teaching Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL)
courses that prioritise content, communication, cognition and culture. For
teachers of 3 and 4 year students at Kanda University of International
Studies, the framework represents a principled and coherent approach to thedesign of content-based language courses for senior students. The aim of thispaper is to introduce the framework and outline its application in a course
on Problem Solving Skills.
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1. INTRODUCTION
Third and fourth year students at Kanda University of International Studies takesemester long content-based English courses, in contrast to their first two years atuniversity in which they study more traditional language-focused courses over a wholeyear. The idea is that the senior students can benefit in their last two years at university
from examining the English language in relation to specific contexts and domains and at
the same time broaden their understandings of global topics and issues of currentrelevance. The thematic scope of these content-based courses includes classes onliterature, cinema, popular culture, national cultures, sports, diet and health, and criticalthinking, amongst others. The courses are designed by lecturers at the university withparticular interests and levels of expertise in these topics. Although the content-based
courses conform to some general guidelines as set down by the university, lecturers enjoy
a substantial amount of freedom in selecting content, structuring and sequencing units of84

Working	  Papers	  in	  Language	  Education	  and	  Research,	  Vol.	  1	  No.	  1.	  February	  2013,	  84	  -­‐	  93	  work, and setting assessment tasks. While this pedagogical independence is appreciated,
it can leave teachers unsure at times of the best way to proceed in designing their courses.
The aim of this paper is to introduce a framework which provides a principled approachto designing content-based language courses and to illustrate the use of this framework in
the delivery of a course on Problem Solving Skills.

2. BACKGROUND

2.1 The 4Cs Framework
The 4Cs framework (Coyle, Hood & Marsh, 2010) describes an approach todesigning and teaching Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) courses. CLIL
is a form of content-based language instruction which has become popular across Europeand which is broadly similar to other manifestations of content-based language pedagogy(see Stoller, 2004 for an overview). CLIL can be defined as “an educational approach
where curricular content is taught through the medium of a foreign language, typically to
students participating in some form of mainstream education at the primary, secondary,or tertiary level” (Dalton-Puffer, 2011, p.183). The 4Cs framework identifies the essentialbuilding blocks of CLIL as content, communication, cognition and culture, hence thename: the 4Cs. The main thesis behind the framework is that the presence and integrationof these 4 elements is necessary to produce a content-based language course of value.
2.2 A Course on Problem Solving Skills
The aforementioned course on Problem Solving Skills is a 15 week course taught
to third and fourth year English major students by the author of this paper at Kanda
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Working	  Papers	  in	  Language	  Education	  and	  Research,	  Vol.	  1	  No.	  1.	  February	  2013,	  84	  -­‐	  93	  University of International Studies. The approximate number of enrolled students eachsemester is 30 and their language levels range from approximately 4.5-7.5 on the IELTS
scale. The initial motivation for creating the course arose from the author’s interest inproblem-based learning (PBL) (see Kwan, 2009 for an overview) as well as from theauthor’s observations that language learning in Japan, especially at the pre-tertiary level,
often suffers from a pedagogical overemphasis on the importance of language
conventions and an accompanying lack of focus on the functions of language. The course
was thus intended from the start to redress this imbalance in some small way byencouraging the enrolled students to view languages, including both Japanese andEnglish, as resources which can empower people in problematic situations. The overall
aim of the course is to assist students in developing a set of tools, including theappropriate language, for a systematic approach to problem solving. The course features a
mixture of formative and summative assessment tasks, including reflective journals, oralpresentations, and project-based work. The next section provides further description ofthe course by examining each of the 4Cs in turn and discussing their incorporation into
the Problem Solving Skills course.

3. DISCUSSION

3.1 Content
A key issue in the 4Cs framework, and indeed in CLIL courses generally, is that
content is pre-eminent; content is the starting point and the driving force behind CLIL
course design. Using content as the organising principle ensures that the ideas and issues
to be discussed in class are not diluted or diminished in any way to compensate for the L286

Working	  Papers	  in	  Language	  Education	  and	  Research,	  Vol.	  1	  No.	  1.	  February	  2013,	  84	  -­‐	  93	  linguistic level of the students. As Coyle et al. (2010) indicate, students are always more‘cognitively-able’ than ‘linguistically-able’ in a foreign language. In other words, theirability to make meaning in interaction with the world, as developed in their nativecultures and languages, is greater than their ability to linguistically engage with the world
according to their current L2 level. Needless to say then, the content selected for a CLIL
course should be challenging, relevant and engaging for learners so that they are
stimulated and motivated to participate in class and to learn.
The course in question has four main strands of content running through it. Thesestrands are introduced in initial lessons and then revisited periodically throughout thecourse. Firstly, the lessons are designed to facilitate student identification and analysis ofdifferent types of problems, from personal/local to social/global issues and including
well-defined problems as well as more open-ended ones. The students are encouraged toshare problems from their everyday lives, discuss recent issues from the news, and evenproject into the future to predict the possible national and global issues of tomorrow.
Secondly, the course encourages the students to evaluate the importance of intrapersonal
resources for problem solving, such as personality and character, the five senses, andmultiple intelligences. Interpersonal dynamics for problem solving are also covered withlessons on communication styles, and cooperative and collaborative behavior patterns.
The third content focus of the course is on different types of thinking, such as deduction,induction, metaphorical thinking, and the ways that certain problems require certain
cognitive approaches. Finally, the students are asked to work with a set of four problem
solving steps – defining a problem, diagnosing root causes, identifying and evaluating
solutions, and implementing solutions – as a heuristic for solving more complex

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Working	  Papers	  in	  Language	  Education	  and	  Research,	  Vol.	  1	  No.	  1.	  February	  2013,	  84	  -­‐	  93	  problems. These four strands of content determine the materials and resources that areused in class and also provide a clear focus for the creation of assessment tasks.

3.2 Communication
Communication describes the language focus of a CLIL course designed using the4Cs framework. While CLIL does not necessarily reject a didactic approach to language
pedagogy with its inherent focus on formS (see Long, 1991), the emphasis within the 4Cs
framework is more often on the functions of language and on how particular
lexicogrammatical, textual and discursive features of language successfully convey
particular meanings and carry the content of the course. As Coyle et al. (2010) explain,communication in the CLIL curriculum is about “learning to use language and using
language to learn” (p.54) so that students engage in meaningful interaction with eachother and with the content of the course.
Regarding the Problem Solving Skills course, the communication focus is on
providing students with opportunities for authentic use of the four language skills. Rather
than attempting instruction of each skill in isolation, a multimodal pedagogy is employedin which students are, for example, asked to combine the audio, visual and oral-linguistic
modes of communication in presenting information to a group. The different
potentialities of the various modes of meaning making are discussed and contrasted sothat students are able to make informed choices and justify their decisions about how they
intend to communicate their various messages. Just as importantly, a number of strategies
for coping with authentic language use are presented and students are asked to evaluate
these as they do various activities, such as watching online lectures and presentations.
Finally, the course features both proactive and incidental approaches to the teaching of88

Working	  Papers	  in	  Language	  Education	  and	  Research,	  Vol.	  1	  No.	  1.	  February	  2013,	  84	  -­‐	  93	  language form. While some elements of language, such as modal and passive verb forms,
demand attention because they are widely applicable to the discussion and description ofproblems and issues generally, other lexicogrammatical issues are dealt with as and when
they arise in student discourse.

3.3 Cognition
Although content is the principal organizing concern when using the 4Cs
framework, the cognitive processes that the activities, lessons and the course overall areintended to activate in the learners are also key considerations and as such need to be
explicitly accounted for in the teacher’s thinking and planning as the course is developed
and units of work are put together. “For CLIL to be effective, it must challenge learners
to create new knowledge and develop new skills through reflection and engagement inhigher-order as well as lower-order thinking” (Coyle et al., 2010, p.54). Bloom et al.’s(1956) taxonomy of cognitive educational objectives describe various orders, or levels, ofthinking, from lower order remembering and recalling to higher order evaluating andcreating, and a well designed content-based language course will engage learners inusing the full gamut of cognitive processes, both lower order and higher order.
The lessons in the Problem Solving Skills course are a mix of input andapplication sessions, which make use of the full range of Bloom et al.’s (1956) taxonomy:
lower order processing – remembering, understanding, applying; higher order processing– analysing, evaluating, creating. During input sessions, content is presented to thestudents through, for example, videos or other online content, in short lectures by theteacher, or in print articles, and the students are given opportunities to discuss andsummarise what they understand from the content and then report back to the class89

Working	  Papers	  in	  Language	  Education	  and	  Research,	  Vol.	  1	  No.	  1.	  February	  2013,	  84	  -­‐	  93	  (understanding). The class then moves on to activities which require students to relate thecontent they have just studied to a given task (applying). At intervals through the course,
there are lessons which involve the students planning, designing and producing things,
such as freestanding towers or logical thinking puzzles (creating). Towards the end of thecourse, the students are given larger, more open-ended assessment tasks which have themselect real world problems for investigation and use the information from the content
sessions to address these problems (remembering). They break the problems down
through description and analysis into causes and effects (analysing) and then use some of
the methods they have learned about for assessing the suitability of various solutions to
the problems (evaluating). In this way, the course iteratively engages different cognitiveprocesses and provides a challenge to students of varying linguistic and cognitive levels.

3.4 Culture
The final C is culture, and in the context of designing a CLIL course, culture refers
to the need to develop intercultural awareness and sensitivity in students during thecourse. This is not a simple matter of introducing foreign customs and traditions
however; it demands that the teacher involve the students in critical analysis of theirnative culture and the taken-for-granted and commonsensical behaviors and attitudes thatare seen to be most indicative of cultures, both their own and foreign. Additionally, there
is a strong emphasis on having students make use of online resources to interact with theworld beyond the classroom and begin to create a global identity for themselves. The
overall idea is that students can experience “deep learning” (Coyle et al., 2010, p.39) bygoing beyond a mere acceptance of how things are in the world to a deeper analysis of
how concepts and social processes are bound together in specific ways and for specific90

Working	  Papers	  in	  Language	  Education	  and	  Research,	  Vol.	  1	  No.	  1.	  February	  2013,	  84	  -­‐	  93	  reasons in different societies. A well designed CLIL course will help learners understandthat culture is both created by and reflected in language and social practice.
The Problem Solving Skills course presents a somewhat dialectical view ofproblems in relation to culture. Problems are approached on the course as both universal,inasmuch as all people have problems, and perspectival, in that what matters to one groupof people may not matter to another. As far as culture is concerned then, problems (aswell as certain techniques for solving them) are aspects of human existence that can anddo transcend culture while it is also true to say that problems are often created orexacerbated in particular places at particular times by particular cultural perspectives. In
this regard, the enrolled students are encouraged to identify the societal and culturalstances which frame an issue as problematic. They also look at the implications ofchanging these stances and, beyond resolving the problem, what that would mean for thesociety in question. The students are encouraged to read blogs and forums online which
address current issues and to contribute their own comments and ideas as part of thecommunal online dialogue on different matters. In this way, the agency of the students isengaged and they develop voice and identity as active global citizens.

4. CONCLUSION

Overall, the 4Cs represent the main areas of pedagogical focus for teachers when
designing CLIL courses. Each area demands individual attention and conscious
consideration as the goals and objectives for a course are outlined. Importantly though,the 4Cs framework is intended as a thoroughly integrated approach to content andlanguage learning and thus it follows that the four separate areas are interrelated and in91

Working	  Papers	  in	  Language	  Education	  and	  Research,	  Vol.	  1	  No.	  1.	  February	  2013,	  84	  -­‐	  93	  fact interdependent. The educational potential of each C – content, communication,cognition and culture – is contingent upon the presence and the convergence of the others
in any given unit of work; a “symbiotic relationship” (Coyle et al., 2010, p.41) is seen toexist between them. It is this interweaving of content, communication, cognition andculture which, far from just giving the course on Problem Solving Skills some structure,
actually creates the conditions for learning opportunities to take place as the students
extend their knowledge, develop their communicative repertoire, engage higher andlower order cognitive processes, and account for the role of culture in the framing and theresolution of problems.

5. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A version of this paper was presented at CamTESOL 2012 (Phnom Penh, Cambodia).
The project was partly funded by the Research Institute of Language Studies andLanguage Education at Kanda University of International Studies, Japan.

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Working	  Papers	  in	  Language	  Education	  and	  Research,	  Vol.	  1	  No.	  1.	  February	  2013,	  84	  -­‐	  93	  REFERENCES

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