{"title":"Leveraging Relational Agency: CLIL Teacher Collaboration in One Kazakhstani University","authors":"D. Philip Montgomery, Peter I. De Costa","doi":"10.1177/00336882241234756","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Although numerous studies about the experiences of teachers in English-medium instruction (EMI) and Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) include calls for greater collaboration between content subject teachers and their English (or second language) teacher counterparts, few describe actual collaborative relationships. In this Kazakhstan-based qualitative study, we applied a teacher agency framework to answer three questions: (a) What challenges do university teachers face when delivering an EMI curriculum?; (b) What collaborative practices do teachers experience?; and (c) How do teachers use collaboration to negotiate the challenges they face? Through observations, participant journals, semi-structured interviews and document analysis, we discovered that teachers found their students’ low levels of engagement and English proficiency, their institution's critical observation culture and the ever-changing national and institutional policy landscape to be challenging. By co-authoring research, exchanging advice and co-teaching, the teachers responded agentively to institutional and ideological structures, thus demonstrating how relational agency can have a resourcing effect on teachers’ experiences. These findings shed light on the ongoing discussion of teacher agency and yield important implications for teachers, teacher education programmes and researchers.","PeriodicalId":46946,"journal":{"name":"Relc Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.6000,"publicationDate":"2024-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Relc Journal","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00336882241234756","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Although numerous studies about the experiences of teachers in English-medium instruction (EMI) and Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) include calls for greater collaboration between content subject teachers and their English (or second language) teacher counterparts, few describe actual collaborative relationships. In this Kazakhstan-based qualitative study, we applied a teacher agency framework to answer three questions: (a) What challenges do university teachers face when delivering an EMI curriculum?; (b) What collaborative practices do teachers experience?; and (c) How do teachers use collaboration to negotiate the challenges they face? Through observations, participant journals, semi-structured interviews and document analysis, we discovered that teachers found their students’ low levels of engagement and English proficiency, their institution's critical observation culture and the ever-changing national and institutional policy landscape to be challenging. By co-authoring research, exchanging advice and co-teaching, the teachers responded agentively to institutional and ideological structures, thus demonstrating how relational agency can have a resourcing effect on teachers’ experiences. These findings shed light on the ongoing discussion of teacher agency and yield important implications for teachers, teacher education programmes and researchers.
期刊介绍:
The RELC Journal is a fully peer-reviewed international journal that publishes original research and review articles on language education. The aim of this Journal is to present information and ideas on theories, research, methods and materials related to language learning and teaching. Within this framework the Journal welcomes contributions in such areas of current enquiry as first and second language learning and teaching, language and culture, discourse analysis, language planning, language testing, multilingual education, stylistics, translation and information technology. The RELC Journal, therefore, is concerned with linguistics applied to education and contributions that have in mind the common professional concerns of both the practitioner and the researcher.