Confirmation Congratulations: Vincent Liang

Using cultural-historical activity theory to investigate teacher agency in content and language integrated classrooms

Content and Language Integrated Learning, or CLIL, involves learning a new language alongside new content from other non-language areas of the curriculum. However, despite a significant body of research showing that CLIL and similar additive bilingual models positively impact both language and academic outcomes (Baker, 2006; Dalton-Puffer, 2008), mainstream school structures typically separate the teaching of languages from other subject areas (Liddicoat et al., 2018). Theoretical in focus and building on notions of agency as “the socioculturally mediated capacity to act” (Ahearn, 2001, p. 112), this research project brings together Pappa et al.’s (2019) tripartite account of teacher agency—pedagogical (inside classrooms), relational (inside schools), and professional (outside schools)—with cultural-historical activity theory (Engeström, 1999) to offer a holistic analytic construct that examines agency across all three planes, by situating language teacher practice as a sociocultural activity (Cross, 2010). This contribution not only recognises teachers as agentic professionals (Freeman & Johnson, 1998; Johnson & Golombek, 2016) but also enables a better understanding of the knowledge teachers need to enact CLIL theory in practice.