Learning to become a CLIL teacher: teaching, reflection and professional development

Abstract

This case study is part of a larger project which aims to determine the usefulness and validity of a model of a pre-service content and language integrated learning (CLIL) teacher education programme inserted in a Master's degree, whose main pedagogical option is to achieve teacher empowerment through cycles of collaborative teaching and shared reflection. More specifically, the two-fold goal of the study is to describe the nature of the student–teacher's main accomplishments on her teaching practice, if any, as well as on the quality of her reflection on that teaching practice; and to identify and characterise key stages in her developmental process throughout. The analysis adopts an ethnographic perspective and explores fragments of videotaped CLIL science lessons in English/L3 and other multimodal data (student–teacher's journal, academic reports and instructor's field notes) collected in a master's degree for secondary teachers in Barcelona, where Catalan and Spanish are co-official. Through Multimodal Conversation Analysis and Ethnographic Content Analysis, the study reconstructs the developmental process undertaken by the informant throughout one academic year. The analysis traces the student–teacher's progress both in the practical handling of the specific challenges of the CLIL lessons and in her progressive understanding of key issues in the domain of Second Language Acquisition (SLA); it also shows how teaching practice and reflection shape and fuel each other. In addition, it illustrates how CLIL teachers may benefit from tools developed in the field of Applied Linguistics in order to improve their professional skills.

Keywords:

• teacher education (TED) models
• teacher-led enquiry
• classroom interactional competence (CIC)
• CLIL
• code choice
• internship

Notes

1. Inquiry-based professional development in CLIL has also been vindicated by Coyle, Hood, and Marsh (2010).

2. Academic Discourse in a Foreign Language: Learning and Assessment of Science Content in the Multilingual CLIL Classroom, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Reference: EDU2010–15783).

3. Although the Units designed by Pilar under the supervision of her mentors made abundant use of peer and group work, lab work and information and communication technologies (ICT), the excepts she selected for discussion correspond to teacher-led sequences, as tends to be the case among novice teachers.

4. For detailed line-by-line CA of the excerpts, see Escobar Urmeneta (in progress).

5. Conversational data were gathered and transcribed by Escobar Urmeneta, Evnitskaya, Fuentes and Jiménez.

6. The term ‘L1’ is used by the student–teacher to refer to Catalan. However, for some of the students in the two groups observed Catalan may not have been the/a family language.

7. The turns cited in passage 4 correspond to a later stage in the lesson not transcribed here. The turn numbers in all passages taken from the student–teacher's reports are the original ones assigned by her. In order to avoid confusion, I am using ‘lines’ instead of ‘turns’ to locate conversational phenomena in the researchers’ more elaborated transcripts (Excerpts 1 and 2).

8. Turn numbers as assigned by the student–teacher. Turn 1 corresponds to lines 1–25 as transcribed in Excerpt 2. Turn 11 to a later stage in the lesson not transcribed here. Turn 23 appears in the student–teacher's transcript in Figure 4.

9. The presence of the camera may have also contributed to the initial reserve shown by the students.