Language–content partnership in higher education: development and opportunities

ABSTRACT

Interdisciplinary collaboration, in the sense of partnership between English language teachers and content teachers, is significant for enhancing university students’ English-medium academic success. It has long been advocated, but it has not become a common phenomenon in higher education institutions. The present article aims to synthesize what has been revealed about such collaboration in tertiary contexts in the (English-medium) literature, and to consider implications for practice and research. A systematic approach was adopted in conducting the literature review. The main body of the article focuses on illustrating five themes grounded in the literature: theoretical perspectives on the need for interdisciplinary collaboration; motivations for interdisciplinary collaboration and slow development of the trend; interdisciplinary collaboration on a continuum of partnership; team teaching in interdisciplinary collaboration; and benefits of interdisciplinary collaboration. Implications for practice and research are then discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Interdisciplinary collaboration
• collaboration between language teachers and content teachers
• language-content partnership
• team teaching
• curriculum-integrated learning support

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the constructive feedback of two anonymous reviewers on an earlier version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Yongyan Li http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8130-7041

Notes

1 In the educational settings outlined here, the English competence in question goes beyond general English proficiency and focuses on discipline-specific lexico-grammatical and discourse-level competence. In the context of the topic addressed in this article, language teachers typically have a training background in linguistics, TESOL or related areas, and seek to help students enhance their communication competence in academic studies. Content teachers are those who teach discipline subjects to students. Interdisciplinary collaboration, as illustrated in this article, is context-specific and represents a wide range of configurations.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by a Research Grants Council (RGC), General Research Fund (GRF), Hong Kong (grant number 17607517).