Raising Native English–Speaking Science Teachers' Language Awareness in Teaching EFL Students Through Teacher-Researcher Collaboration

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

Abstract

Objectives
It is not easy to implement CLIL successfully as it has high requirements for teachers’ competencies in both content and language areas. In Asia, there is a myth that it is better to employ native-English speakers (NES) to conduct bilingual education (Lin & Man, 2009). Nevertheless, there is no guarantee that teachers with native or high English proficiency have academic language awareness necessary to support students in learning content subjects in English as their L2 (An, Macaro, & Childs, 2019; Lo, 2017). This study explores the complicated process of developing NES Science teachers’ language awareness and investigates the factors that may have affected such a process.

Theoretical framework
This study draws on a materials design-driven model of teacher-researcher collaboration (Lin & Cheung, 2014) to facilitate NES teacher development of academic language awareness. This model includes three crucial parts. The first part is contextual analysis, which helps researchers to understand teachers’ readiness and skills. In the second part, teachers and researchers work together and share their expertise to design CLIL materials and raise teachers’ language awareness through practice, feedback sharing and lesson materials co-design. The rationale behind is that teachers usually have a good knowledge of the educational contexts but they may not be familiar with CLIL approaches; meanwhile, researchers have been well-trained with theories but they often do not know the complexities of the local educational system (Anderson & Shattuck, 2012). Therefore, teachers’ and researchers’ different knowledge base can complement each other.

Methodology
This study adopted a multiple-case approach to investigate teachers’ professional development within its contexts (Yin, 2003). Four NES Science teachers in an international primary school in China participated in this study. Multiple sources (e.g. lesson plan discussions, co-designed teaching materials, lesson observations, and post-lesson interviews) were collected to understand teacher development. Thematic analysis was used to analyze the qualitative data and reveal the patterns of teacher development.
Results
The results show that teachers demonstrated some change in their language awareness and CLIL teaching practices, though to varying degrees. Most of the NES teachers understood the difficulties of subject-specific language for EFL students and employed more strategies to scaffold students’ language learning in Science lessons. Multiple factors (e.g. school support, teachers’ existing beliefs and attitudes, teachers’ previous teaching and training experience, and some critical features of collaborative activities) may have affected NES content teacher development in their language awareness. These factors are interconnected and work together to make teacher growth occur (or not occur). This can explain why teachers in this study showed different degrees of development.

Significance
Though there is a growing body of research on CLIL, few studies have paid attention to teacher development in CLIL, especially those NES content teachers. This study focuses on enhancing academic language awareness of NES content teachers, which is usually ignored in Asia as they have native English proficiency. The findings reinforce the importance of language awareness in CLIL contexts and provide useful implications for NES content teacher professional development.

Author

• Limin Yuan, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University