Teacher dispositions and agency across content and language integrated spaces for schooling

Evidence now suggests that the most effective language teaching approaches focus on teaching language while simultaneously developing new knowledge and skills from other curriculum areas. Benefits extend to a positive impact on students’ first language and literacy skills, cognitive skills and higher order thinking, and social and intercultural competence (e.g., Fielding & Harbon, 2022, San Isidro & Lasagabaster, 2018). Yet Languages has historically been conceived of as a separate curriculum domain, distinct from other areas of the curriculum.

It is unclear how the conventional organization of schools, and the curriculum in particular, impacts on teachers’ capacity to undertake an integrated approach to language and content in the context of mainstream schooling. Also unknown is how a teacher’s preponderance towards CLIL — in terms of having either ‘content’ or ‘language’ orientation — might differently guide their approach to intergration. Through a classroom-based study of teachers’ pedagogic practice, this theme investigates how the ‘activity of schooling’ affords and constraints opportunities to undertake an integrated approach to teaching content and language, through case studies of how, and to what extent, teachers achieve language/content integration in their own conditions for practice, and the dispositional ‘sense making frames’ that guide this.

This project is seeking proposals from potential doctoral candidates related to this focus.

Key projects and related publications

• Cross, R. (2020). The ‘subject’ of Freeman & Johnson’s reconceived knowledge base of second language teacher education. Language Teaching Research, 24(1), 37–48. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362168818777521
• 2022 Melbourne Strategic Scholarship: PhD in Content and Language Integrated Learning
• Language vs. Content Dispositional Orientations to CLIL in Practice (2023 MGSE Seed Grant)

People

• Russell Cross
• Shu Ohki
• Yvette Slaughter
• Xiaoqing Chen
• Vincent Liang