Article published in:
Teaching, Learning and Scaffolding in CLIL Science Classrooms
Edited by Yuen Yi Lo and Angel M.Y. Lin
[Journal of Immersion and Content-Based Language Education 7:2] 2019
► pp. 166–191

Language focused episodes by monolingual teachers in English Medium Instruction science lessons

| Purdue University Fort Wayne
| University of Oxford
| University of Oxford

This study is situated in a newly emerging EMI setting in China where an Anglophone high school curriculum is taught by predominantly foreign teachers through English to local Chinese students. These teachers are termed ‘monolingual teachers’ in the sense that they cannot use the students’ L1 as a resource in their teaching should they wish to, as opposed to the typical bilingual teachers commonly explored in the existing EMI literature. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis of 30 video-recorded EMI science lessons taught by 15 monolingual teachers we identified and explored the language-focused-episodes (LFEs) where students’ attention was explicitly diverted from the content plane to the language plane. We found very limited explicit language instruction, with non-technical vocabulary being the main type of LFEs, and only a narrow range of grammatical features being attended to. The implications for this lack of focus on language are discussed in the context of monolingual teachers but also with reference to the potential for bilingual teachers to use both L1 and L2 for LFEs.

Keywords: bilingual education, classroom interaction, discourse analysis, content-based instruction
Published online: 25 September 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/jicb.18019.an
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