CLIL teacher development : how do teachers collaborate?

Abstract

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) has gained support and popularity as one of the instructional approaches to promote and foster the dual focus of second language acquisition and content subject knowledge learning. There has been a mixed view of its benefits in student language and content learning outcome, but teacher collaboration (TC) in CLIL has been identified as a key area for teacher professional development among different empirical research studies. Among the studies conducted to understand forms of TC, there has yet been a consistent and shared understanding of how collaboration takes place to utilise the expertise of language teachers and content subject teachers. Studies have found that one of the obstacles for effective CLIL implementation is insufficient teacher training to implement productive and constructive TC, but it is known to the teacher community that positive collegial collaboration enhances teaching and pedagogical practices. In the process of forming collegial relationships, whether the relationship is positive and favourable to CLIL TC, teachers (re-)construct their teacher identity during collaboration. Teachers’ identity and perceptions of their roles contribute to the effectiveness of CLIL implementation. Therefore, the investigation and exploration of how CLIL teachers collaborate to identify potential issues and problems will further enrich the planning and development for teacher professional growth, in addition to positive learning outcomes for both teachers and students. Through a qualitative multi-case study, the researcher as an interpretivist aimed to investigate the process of CLIL TC and to what extent English teachers and content subject teachers’ perceptions and pedagogies are shaped throughout the collaboration process in a bilingual private secondary school in Hong Kong that implements the International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum from an observer point of view. Two cases, each with eight participating teachers including English and content subject teachers that were considered as a collaborative unit within an academic school year, were studied to understand how the English language and content subject teachers collaborated in the process of teaching cross-disciplinary units (also known as IDUs) to fulfil the expectations of the school curriculum. Data collected from pre- and post-collaboration interviews, co-planning meetings, lesson observations, and artefacts such as meeting minutes and lesson plans were analysed and triangulated to understand how CLIL TC can be facilitated and enhanced. Effective CLIL TC provided room for teachers to (re-)construct their identities; in the study, some English teachers became more content-aware, and some content subject teachers became more language-aware due to positive TC. Changes in teacher identities fostered the desire for further development in teachers’ teaching practices, which led to a demand for more professional development opportunities for teachers to better their skills in order to enhance CLIL implementation. In this study, leadership structure, curriculum design, and professional development opportunities were identified as key factors contributing to successful CLIL TC. Further studies on TC can be conducted in other contexts to generalise the findings.