Examining the effects of teacher collaboration on student learning in a CLIL classroom

ABSTRACT

Content and language integrated learning (CLIL) programs impose enormous demands on teachers, who are expected to integrate the two aspects pedagogically. Content and language teachers are thus encouraged to collaborate to help students master content knowledge and develop their additional language (L2) proficiency simultaneously. To reveal whether such teacher collaboration (TC) is beneficial, researchers have also attempted to examine its effectiveness on student learning. Situated in a Chinese tertiary classroom, this quasi-experimental study investigated how TC affected student learning by recruiting a content instructor, a language expert, and 50 students in two intact drama classes (n = 25 each). The impact of TC on student learning was captured by two character analyses written by the two groups of students before and after the intervention which lasted throughout the 13-week drama course. Results from inferential statistics and textual analysis showed that students in the experimental group improved their writing in both content and language aspects as compared to their peers in the control group. Such findings show that TC is conducive to student learning in CLIL and yield significant implications for CLIL pedagogy.

KEYWORDS:

• CLIL
• teacher collaboration
• professional development
• higher education
• bilingual education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Tin Ka Ping Foundation Postgraduate Fellowship.

Notes on contributors

Xiaochen Rui

Xiaochen Rui is a Lecturer at the School of International Studies, University of International Business and Economics (Beijing, China). He received his PhD at the University of Hong Kong. His research interests lie in bilingual education, CLIL, teacher collaboration, and second language acquisition.

Xiaochu Li

Xiaochu Li is a Senior Lecturer at the School of International Studies, University of International Business and Economics (Beijing, China). Her major teaching and research interests lie in the fields of technology-enhanced language learning and language teaching.

Yuxia Li

Yuxia Li is an Associate Professor at the School of International Studies, University of International Business and Economics (Beijing, China). Her current research and teaching interests are in the areas of second language learning, English for specific purposes, intercultural communication, discourse analysis and sociolinguistics. Her key publications have appeared in such journals as Language Teaching and in books published by Multilingual Matters, Peking University Press, and Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press.

Yuen Yi Lo

Yuen Yi Lo is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Education, the University of Hong Kong. Her research focuses on bilingual education, cross-curricular teacher collaboration, medium of instruction, translanguaging, and CLIL assessment. Her publications have appeared in top journals such as International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, Language Teaching Research, and Language and Education.