CLIL teacher belief and language awareness in higher education

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), which is defined as “a dual-focused education approach in which an additional language is used for the learning and teaching of both content and language” (Coyle, Hood & Marsh, 2010, p.1), is gaining momentum in both research and practice in many parts of the world. In practice, CLIL is being adopted, and adapted, in all levels of education across Europe, in Australia, and in Asia. In recent decades, researchers in CLIL are gaining intense attention in contexts such as Hong Kong where English is learned as a foreign language or as an additional language (EAL). For example, numerous studies have been conducted in CLIL classrooms in Hong Kong, investigating the language(s) used by the teacher and students (Lin, 2015), multimodalities (Lin, 2012), and assessment tasks (Lo & Lin, 2014). However, how teachers, who have a pivotal role in a classroom, make their decisions in choosing different language varieties and registers, using multimodal resources and designing assessment tasks remains unclear, particularly in the higher education context.

Understanding what teachers think, know and believe, and of its relationship to teachers' classroom practices has become a well-established domain of enquiry and a key theme in the field of language teaching and teacher education. For example, Borg’s (2006) framework on language teacher cognition highlights three key dimensions in the study of teacher cognition, namely schooling, professional education and context, and outlines their relationship to classroom practice.

In this light, this research study aims to address the gap by investigating CLIL teachers’ unobservable beliefs in their mind and their language awareness via their actions and practices in CLIL classrooms in a post-secondary institution in Hong Kong. By taking a constructivist’s epistemological approach to inquiry, this qualitative case study investigates a business teacher in a tertiary institution in Hong Kong through in-depth qualitative data collected by classroom observations, background and stimulated recall interviews and teachers’ journals. Preliminary findings show that the teacher consciously and unconsciously drew on various linguistic resources, including L1 academic written/oral registers, L1 everyday registers, L2 everyday registers, L2 academic oral registers as well as multimodalities to facilitate learning of language and business content in a semester-long subject.

Keywords: Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL); teacher language awareness; teacher belief; higher education