Development of the beliefs and language awareness of content subject teachers in CLIL: does professional development help?

ABSTRACT

In Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) programmes, students are expected to master content knowledge and language simultaneously. The worldwide popularity of this kind of programme has called for professional development, particularly for content subject teachers who have to shoulder some responsibilities of language teaching in CLIL. There have been several frameworks or proposals for professional development of CLIL teachers. Yet, empirical studies investigating the effectiveness of CLIL professional development programmes remain scarce. This gap is particularly important, since the relationship between professional development and teacher change is complicated and there are various factors affecting whether and how teacher would change. This study implemented a 6-month professional development programme for a group of content subject teachers in CLIL in Hong Kong. With data gathered with questionnaires, interviews, lesson observations and post-lesson reflections, this paper reports the trajectory of three case teachers who seemed to experience different degrees of changes in beliefs and language awareness. These differences could be explained by the influence of such factors as school context, learning experience and subject discipline. This study yields important implications for teacher education in CLIL and teacher change.

KEYWORDS:

• Content and language integrated learning
• teacher beliefs
• teachers’ language awareness
• teacher change
• professional development

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank all the participants in this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Yuen Yi Lo is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education, the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include Medium of Instruction policy, code-switching, CLIL, language across the curriculum and teacher collaboration. She has published her work in Review of Educational Research, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, and Language and Education.

Notes

1. Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is used as an umbrella term in this paper to refer to a wide array of programmes which use students’ L2 as the medium of instruction for non-language content subjects. Immersion, content-based instruction and English-medium education can be regarded as its variants, although their differences in educational goals, sociolinguistic contexts, teacher and student profiles are acknowledged.

2. It is worth noting that the ‘CLIL teachers’ in this study refer to those who have been trained as content subject specialists and then asked to teach in CLIL programmes. Hence, they have not received proper training in language education. The researcher acknowledges the fact that in some educational contexts, teachers are required to be trained in both subject and language disciplines in order to be qualified to teach in CLIL programmes.

3. Borg (2003) uses the term ‘teacher cognition’ as an inclusive term encompassing various concepts such as beliefs, knowledge, attitudes, assumptions, conceptions, etc. This paper focuses on beliefs and language awareness, as these two dimensions have been shown to be the most relevant when discussing professional learning of CLIL teachers.

4. The key principle of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) is that language is a meaning-making resource, and the linguistic choices that speakers or writers make (e.g. the use of words, sentences and discourse) are shaped by the social activities and communicative goals (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004; Llinares, Morton, and Whittaker 2012).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Hong Kong under Seed Funding Programme for Basic Research.