This article is concerned with subject-specific language in the context of CLIL education. More specifically, the focus lies in exploring hands-on tasks in CLIL physics and chemistry lessons as sites for using and learning subject-specific language. Following Lorenzo (2007), attention is paid to the role of subject-specific language in both pre-task phases, during the tasks, and in post-task phases. The findings indicate that while teachers’ strategies differ somewhat, the pretask and post-phases provide learners more exposure to subject-specific language than the task performance itself where language use is highly context-dependent. Throughout the phases, there is also some evidence of teachers subtly directing learners from everyday expressions toward subject-specific language but this happens without explicit orientation to language. This points towards the need to raise teachers’ awareness of the subject-specific nature of language and its role in meaning construction.