The significance of affordances on teachers’ choices: embedding Japanese across the curriculum in Australian secondary schools

Abstract

In Australia, although content and language integrated learning (CLIL) has been introduced in some mainstream schools, monolingual structures prevail. In this article, I suggest that translanguaging pedagogy may be a useful way of thinking about the integration of language and content in the Australian mainstream context, but that attention initially needs to be paid to affordances, or institutional opportunities and constraints. The qualitative study under discussion in the article investigated affordances associated with teachers’ choices around embedding Japanese across the curriculum in three Government secondary schools. Five teachers were observed using Japanese to teach – or support the teaching of – a subject area and four were interviewed. Significant affordances were found to be curriculum-related school structures, collaboration and CLIL training. Although these affordances differed from school to school, collaborative practices were found in the school structures of all three schools, and CLIL training was found to endow trained teachers with the authority to experiment with language and content integration in different ways.

Keywords:

• affordances
• Australia
• cross-curricular language use
• CLIL
• secondary
• Japanese