Researcher-Teacher Collaboration for Adopting Critical Content and Language Integrated Learning in the Social Studies Classroom

• In Event: Equipping Teachers With Educational Responsibility Awareness for a Heteroglossic Approach to Content and Language Integrated Learning

Abstract

Objectives
In the face of globalisation, CLIL has been widely adopted to obtain dual goals in both content learning and language learning. While the government has initiated policies in response to the trend, CLIL in Taiwan is still in its infancy. Thus, this study aims to explore how to develop a repertoire of teacher-friendly CLIL pedagogical and curriculum design resources. Through researcher-teacher collaboration, a social studies teacher and I integrated the learning of English with societal issues to raise students’ critical awareness.

Theoretical framework
Based on the aforementioned definition of CLIL, the aim of adopting CLIL is twofold. The rationale behind CLIL can be explained by Halliday’s (1993) arguments about language and meaning. Human learning is said to be “a process of making meaning” (p. 93). Therefore, language, when taken as a resource to construct meaning, is inextricably interwoven with content. Of similar importance is the integration of criticality into English language learning (Benesch, 1993; Atkinson, 1997; Pennycook, 1999) to refrain from confining teaching and learning a language to just language mechanics. Hence, Benesch (1993, 2001) called for the inclusion of ideologies for language learning.

Methods and data sources
This design-based research (DBR) study uses research data collected from a class of twenty-one primary grade four students and a social studies teacher. The data comprises field notes taken during classroom observations, learning artefacts, teaching artefacts, written record of students’ feedback, focus group interviews with students and formal and informal interviews with the teacher. Three units involving societal issues, e.g. urban renewal, the homeless and blue-collar workers, were designed. Focusing on what rather than how the participants responded, I conducted a thematic analysis to obtain a general idea of the data regarding the participants’ overall attitudes, changes and reflections.

Results
The research findings show the important elements of successful researcher-teacher collaboration and implementation of CLIL units. First, the dynamics between the researcher and teacher and between the teacher and students need to be addressed. To do so, creating an egalitarian setting with a dialogic approach is necessary. Second, while CLIL is defined as the teaching of content through a target language, regardless of in a content or a language class, i.e. using the language to teach content, the results show that in a context where students have limited English proficiency, it is content that could drive the learning of the target language, i.e. using content as the meaningful contexts to teach a language. Third, students’ critical awareness was observed when they were provided with meaningful multimodal and multilingual resources which facilitated their development of ideas.

Significance
This study uncovers how a teacher and researcher collaborated to design and implement CLIL units to enhance students’ critical awareness and language proficiency. The findings could contribute to teacher education in CLIL, specifically in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context. Finally, this study calls on content teachers to challenge the assumptions of which proficiency/grade levels are or are not supposed to engage in language learning while carrying out critical discussions in content areas.

Author

• Kao Chia-Ling Gupta, The University of Hong Kong