Conceptualising music education not only as ‘music-making’ but as ‘musical meaning-making‘, Valerie Krupp ’s learning episode provides a fascinating example of developing learner musical literacy skills – involving intra- and interpersonal negotiation and reflection and drawing on subject-specific knowledge, skills and processes. She argues that for learners to engage meaningfully in music analysis, recensions, aesthetic arguments and so on, they need to practise and use the language of musical genres and musical inquiry alongside language for critical and aesthetic evaluation. This, she proposes, promotes learner agency, encompassing musical literacies, competences and critical cultural consciousness. Situating the learning episode as praxial, student-relevant and real-world, it concerns the posting of a sea shanty, ‘The Wellerman’, on TikTok. Against all odds, the song ‘went viral‘, leading to ‘in the moment‘ global interest in sea shanties. Learners investigate why such a musical phenomenon took place. This opens up critical inquiry into the socio-cultural context of the shanty genre – classifying, analysing and critiquing musical and social media and analysing user comments. This example could be transferred to exploring other musical genres and interpretations.

Teresa Connolly argues that a profound understanding of key chemistry concepts and processes is as fundamental to scientific literacy as mastering complex procedures and skills, such as performing experiments, interpreting data or communicating one’s findings using specific text types. However, she points out that such an understanding of chemical concepts is inhibited not only by learners’ poor command of academic language but also by the fact that chemical processes can be observed at different levels of abstraction. This poses a specific challenge in chemistry because learners often report having difficulties distinguishing clearly between processes at the sub-microscopic, the microscopic and the macroscopic level, which will lead to misconceptions and prevent deeper understanding. To address that issue, Connolly’s deeper learning episode on redox reactions offers engaging ways of promoting scientific reasoning through a series of student-led experiments and inquiry. Systematic guidance in academic language use will enable learners to express their findings and observations precisely and adequately and thus help them distinguish the processes occurring at various levels of abstraction with increasing ease and confidence.

Nicole Berg’s deeper learning episode aims at improving learners’ ability to orally explain geography. To do that, learners will listen to podcasts on global warming to analyse expert explanations. This way, they will learn about the nature and structure of scientific explanations in context. In addition, learners will decode, analyse and practise prosodic features of spoken language (in terms of intonation, stress, pausing and phonological chunking). This will support storage and retrieval of academic language elements from long-term-memory. Ultimately, learners will structure and formulate their own oral explanations of subject-specific content. This highly innovative approach to promoting oral language skills uses insights into the mechanics of language acquisition and speech production to facilitate subject learning.

Frederic Taveau makes a strong argument for reconceptualising modern languages – in this case French – as a subject discipline, with knowledge domains and pathways that explore alternative ways of learning and using language with beginner or near-beginner students. By foregrounding textual fluency, he challenges more traditional approaches to language learning that emphasise linguistic systems. Instead, he focuses on the use of multimodal literary texts to promote meaning-making and language learning through deepening learners’ critical and cultural awareness of relevant, motivating real-world phenomena. Taveau outlines the processes involved in enabling novice learners of French to become more self-confident and self-directed creative literary writers using language in unprecedented ways. Through a series of scaffolded text-centred learning episodes, learners are guided through pluriliteracies-based steps, increasingly using cognitive discourse functions creatively and confidently (explaining, describing, classifying, arguing and evaluating) to construct their own descriptive literary texts on a Gothic theme. These texts are ‘owned’ by students, demonstrating language learning as a creative, motivating means to understanding their world and that of others.