Challenges and Potentials in Content and Language Integrated Learning Curriculum Genre Design and Assessment Alignment: A Teacher-Researcher Perspective

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

Abstract

Objectives
This paper investigates challenges and potentials experienced by a bilingual teacher-researcher in adopting a heteroglossic approach to renovating a CLIL curriculum genre (Christie, 2002; Lin, 2016), along with its alignment with school assessment, in an English as a medium of instruction (EMI) higher education context in Hong Kong.

Perspectives
In Hong Kong, a monolingual perspective (Jenkins, 2014) is upheld in EMI higher education, regulating an ‘English-only’ policy in curriculum genre designs and pedagogical practices. English, as the target language, delivering the target content, has been delimiting choices of communicative repertoires and affecting decision-making among teachers and students in CLIL classrooms for socially interacting with one another in the process of teaching, learning and assessment. Still, bilingual students pursuing higher education in Hong Kong are exposed to plurilingual content information and multimodal meaning-making resources when they take their initiatives to explore disciplinary subject matters, academic genres and discipline-appropriate registers flexibly through university libraries, educational websites, and a multiple array of social media platforms, such as YouTube and corporate webpages. This paper, thus, proposes a heteroglossic approach to aligning assessment and learning in CLIL with the Multimodalities Entextualisation Cycle (MEC) (Lin, 2015; 2019), redirecting core processes of meaning-making from textbook-centric teaching/ learning to multimodalities (Kress, 2010).

Methods and data sources
Taking the teacher-researcher perspective, this paper reports the data collected through the pre-pilot and pilot studies of a 13-week CLIL curriculum genre design and implementation for 70 bilingual Hong Kong tertiary students in a Public Relation Writing course in two consecutive academic years (2017-19). A qualitative account of research findings triangulated with course materials, lesson observations, semi-structured individual interviews, focus group discussion, and teacher-researcher reflective reports, is provided for piloting a heteroglossic approach to aligning assessment and learning in CLIL.

Results
The research findings reveal three major potentials to adopt the MEC as curriculum genres (Rothery, 1996; Rose, 2015) and planned dialogic spaces for designed scaffolding and spontaneous scaffolding (Gibbons, 2002), ranging from (1) providing access to and ownership of content/ knowledge/ language skills in the targeted academic content subject areas, (2) co-creating iterative and adjustable cycles of entextualisation in the meaning-making process, to (3) leveraging and transforming multilingual and multimodal teaching/ learning experience into written/ spoken discipline-specific academic texts. However, the research findings also point to the challenges in breaking through the monoglossic view well established among school regulations, expectations from students in EMI higher education, along with anxieties and stress experienced by the teacher-researcher in proposing a heteroglossic approach to renovate the current research and pedagogical practice in CLIL.

Scholarly significance
This paper provides a teacher-researcher account to balance theoretical principles and research/ pedagogical practices in CLIL. Adopting a heteroglossic approach (Bakhtin, 1981; Garcia and Lin, 2016; Canagarajah, 2018) to renovating the curriculum genre, for example, by using the MEC (Lin, 2015; 2019), may inspire bilingual teachers and students to co-create dialogic scaffolds through taking “an approach to bilingualism that is centered not on languages, but on the practices of bilinguals that are readily observable” (Garcia, 2009, p. 44).

Author

• Phoebe SIU, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University