Integration of Content and Language In Higher Education

Instructional time for newcomer English learners necessitates a balanced integration of language and content within the curriculum (Batt, 2008) and that the development of the academic uses of language for newcomer students becomes the obligation of every secondary content discipline teacher to engage these students in meaningful language use for content specific purposes (Heritage et al., 2015). Now more than ever, secondary content area teachers are critical actors in ensuring that the necessary language skills through their content instruction are taught and supported for newcomer students in their classes. Thus, this design development research employs a robust intervention that promotes a systematic approach for an interdisciplinary team of secondary content area teachers to have productive conversations around instruction in order to better understand and implement an integrated language and content instruction for newcomer students.

Set in a small high school located at a predominantly immigrant neighborhood in a large urban community in Northern California, this study focused on three teachers as a teacher team who serve newcomer students. I found that participants in this study struggled to develop a common understanding and enacting effective language and content integration in classroom practice. However, findings suggested promising efficacy of this design study, particularly around improving participants’ instructional mindset along the dimensions of language and content integration understanding and language and content integration in practice. I present the utility of the Teacher Team Cycle of Inquiry as a systematic, structured sequence of activities that reframes the responsibility of teaching language development for newcomer students as one of a teacher team’s collective and shared responsibility. This teacher team structure, along with the set of learning activities, can serve as a catalyst for capacity building for teachers to improve their practice and understanding of integrating language and content.

An editorial accompanying LACLIL Vol. 8 No. 2, this paper reviews the twined history of the journal and the Biennial CLIL Symposia as hubs for the intersection of research and practice in global and local contexts. There is a brief review of the papers in LACLIL Vol. 8 No. 2, representing both proceedings from the 5th Biennial CLIL Symposium in 2014 as well as ongoing submissions to the journal. Finally, future challenges and objectives for CLIL are outlined, pointing the ways forward for both the LACLIL journal and its contributors.

This paper investigates the quality of knowledge of technical words that high-school students learned from subject reading. In particular, it focuses on similarities and differences between students who learned new words through their L1 and their L2. In the study, 72 students were divided into two groups and asked to read and listen to two expository texts. One group received the texts in their L1 (Slovak) and the other group in their L2 (English). Afterwards the participants were tested on their knowledge of twelve technical words that appeared in the texts. The responses were examined in terms of the completeness of word meaning and the presence of errors. The results showed that compared to the L1-instructed students, the L2-instructed participants provided word meanings that were less complete and less precise. Word meanings from both groups contained errors involving omission of correct meaning components and inclusion of incorrect meaning components. L2-instructed participants made more errors of both kinds. The differences between the two groups are discussed with respect to vocabulary acquisition and subject learning.

The purpose of this study is to open a window onto Italian Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) teachers' language competence and the ways it is currently being assessed by presenting a specific case: one testing session of the first batch of future CLIL teachers aimed at assessing their level of competence in a foreign language, in which the authors were personally involved as decision makers, organisers and observers. To provide an insight into the issue, this paper first contextualises Italian CLIL teacher training within policy recommendations provided by the European Union and the Italian Ministry of Education. Secondly, it describes in detail the specific decision-making process related to the evaluation of aspiring CLIL teachers in Southern Italy in the vehicular language, to explore suggestions for and issues related to such evaluation. Finally, it presents the outcomes of this evaluation, drawing on survey and observational data, to uncover the descriptive characteristics of the individuals involved in the analysis (teachers in Southern Italy who volunteered to be future CLIL teachers), the extent to which they displayed willingness to communicate in the vehicular language of instruction and differences that emerged in perceived and actual proficiency, and across subgroups. The different perspectives of policy, test development and test outcomes inform suggestions for training of CLIL teachers in the Italian context and beyond.