Dual roles of content teachers in CLIL classrooms in higher education

CLIL is “a dual-focused educational approach in which an additional language is used for the learning and teaching of both content and language” (Coyle et al., 2010, p.1). However, practically, this “idealised” form of CLIL may be implemented differently in many educational contexts such as Hong Kong, in which students’ additional language, English, is used as the medium of instruction of non-language content subjects (Lo & Lin, 2019). Content teachers, despite having a pivotal role in CLIL classrooms, may understand and interpret the teaching and learning of language differently in their content subjects.

In this light, this research study aims to investigate content teachers’ understandings and attitudes of CLIL, and their roles of content and language teaching in the classroom. This qualitative case study investigates three business teachers in a tertiary institution in Hong Kong through in-depth qualitative data collected via interviews and lesson recordings in a semester-long subject. Preliminary findings show that while all teacher participants recognised the dual focus of CLIL and identified themselves as language teachers, they only spent little time on the teaching of language, limited to rectifying pronunciation of words and introducing discipline-specific lexical items.