Advancing CLIL Approaches in EMI Settings Through International Collaboration: An Introduction

1 Introduction

In response to the accelerating intertwining of educational attainment and international economic competition, higher education institutions are beginning to place pressure on content teachers to CLIL-ize their teaching by transforming their curricula to focus on subject content and the English language simultaneously (Moncada-Comas & Block, 2019). For example, in Kazakhstan, several languages (including Kazakh, Russian, and English) have been enshrined in medium-of-instruction policies, with English specifically positioned as a means to support “productive employment [through] entrepreneurship and development of small and medium-sized businesses” (Prime Minister of the Republic of Kazakhstan, 2021). English Medium of Instruction (EMI) policies have proliferated in recent years (Tajik et al., 2023), especially in the instruction of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) content courses, as Kazakhstan’s national government aims for economic growth and competitiveness on the international stage by transforming higher education.

While large, well-funded urban universities may navigate this transition without excessive strain, Kazakhstan’s rural universities (KRU) have few teacher preparation programs that assist the development of practical strategies for English language lessons through CLIL-based instruction (Amankulova, 2018; Karabassova, 2020). This has resulted in these institutions’ relying on international collaboration projects through collaborative programs. As a result, minimal discussion has occurred about how to establish, design, and adapt international collaboration projects with English language universities (Barahona & Davin, 2021).

Project SCILLA, which stands for STEM Content Integrated with Language-Learning Activities, was developed to meet this demand. In broad terms, this was a collaboration between Michigan State University and a consortium of 10 Kazakhstan rural universities. Project SCILLA was carried out from May to October 2020—at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic—and was held synchronously online through the use of Zoom (www.zoom.us). Thirty university educators throughout Kazakhstan participated in the series, which included instruction on pedagogical principles (drawing primarily on Ball et al., 2015) and an opportunity to design, conduct, and reflect on a CLIL-informed lesson with their students. The professional development activities provided training and resources to participants who needed to integrate English into their STEM courses in the 2020-2021 academic year. Their experiences, however, extended beyond their own classrooms and provided rich insights into the nature of professional development and international partnerships.

In this introduction to a guest-edited special issue, we provide a brief overview of CLIL and how it came to drive our development of Project SCILLA to support teacher development in Kazakhstan. We highlight the role technology played in adapting to the constraints of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the core values that we believe enabled our universities to develop, foster, and grow their international language education partnerships. We overview the six articles that comprise the special issue and conclude with a call for deliberate and dialogic international collaboration to support teachers responding to language policy demands.

2 CLIL, Teacher Development, and International Partnerships

CLIL, as the name implies, is an educational approach where new disciplinary content is taught through the medium of an additional language and, in turn, the additional language is taught through the medium of new disciplinary content (Ball et al., 2015). This reciprocal relationship between content and language was a pragmatic solution to a need identified by several European countries to equip citizens with two languages other than their native language (Marsh, 2002). CLIL soon gained traction across Europe (Aguilar, 2017; Isidro & Lasagabaster, 2019) and Latin America (Banegas, 2020), and resonated with leaders and educators in countries across greater Asia, including China (Lo, 2019), Japan (MacGregor, 2016), and Vietnam (Thuy & Nguyen, 2016). The result is that CLIL has been a top-down policy solution in search of veracity. While its initial design was informed by reasoned and principled scholarship, its implementation has been relatively untested. The evidentiary case for CLIL—how it affects teachers and students (De Costa et al., 2020), how to integrate it into course syllabi (Airey, 2021), or how to measure and sustain effectiveness (Liu & Phelps, 2020) —is a work in progress. Nevertheless, the recent appearance of handbooks and edited volumes (e.g., Banegas & Zappa-Hollman, 2023; Codó, 2023) speaks to its importance for researchers and policymakers in language and education.

CLIL is commonly described (following Airey, 2021) as an approach to teaching and curriculum design that sits at the center of a spectrum between English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and English Medium Instruction (EMI), with the former focusing primarily on language with less attention to content and the latter on content while ignoring language instruction. However, Kling and Dimova (2023) convincingly argue that CLIL scholars should move beyond this binary categorization and suggest that CLIL can operate along many other equally important dimensions than the balance between content and language. These include 1) the purpose administrators and educators have in adopting the approach, whether in response to a policy from “above” or in reaction to a need “from below”; 2) the degree to which the approach is integrated into courses, syllabi, and program descriptions; 3) the amount of collaboration between content and language specialists; and 4) the continuity of the initiative, ranging from one-off workshops to continuous, sustained partnerships. Codó (2023) further expands this nuanced treatment of CLIL, warning that we should not lose sight of the social inequalities and the intensification of market logics that can be glossed over in sweeping acceptance of a new teaching methodology. Project SCILLA aimed to explore this multiplicity of dimensions and critical perspectives, both in its implementation with teachers and in its presentation in conference presentations and research publications.

Project SCILLA was first conceptualized during a dinner meeting between Yuliya Novitskaya and Douglas Hartman several years ago. Doug, a professor at Michigan State University (MSU), was there because of a faculty fellowship awarded by the country’s Ministry of Education and Science, and Yuliya was a longtime faculty member at the Kazakh-American Free University (KAFU) in eastern Kazakhstan. As they talked they dreamt of a way to support the ongoing reconstruction (perestroika) of educational institutions in the former Soviet Union. The result was a partnership that drew upon, and developed, expertise from faculty at KAFU, MSU, and other rural universities in Kazakhstan, thereby blending Yuliya’s experience, Doug’s background, and a national need. Such a project, they thought, could support university faculty dispersed across a country 1,800 miles long (nearly 3,000 kilometers), a distance similar to driving from Washington, DC to Salt Lake City or Beijing to Kashgar.

The result was a plan to ally Michigan State University with a consortium of 10 Kazakhstan rural universities (see Figure 1) on three interrelated areas of activity: program design, methodological adaptation, and technological outreach. The first area related to reworking teaching preparation programs so that CLIL-oriented pedagogies might be embedded in the curriculum of STEM methods courses. The second area described the process of equipping pre-service teachers with CLIL-oriented pedagogies so their EMI in STEM might improve student language-learning outcomes. Finally, we aimed to contribute to the development of online modules that rural teacher preparation programs (TPPs) could embed in the curriculum of STEM methods courses. These areas were selected because they supported Kazakhstan’s efforts to develop a trilingual education system and address the nation’s urgent need for STEM teachers who can provide English-mediated instruction in rural Kazakhstan.

Figure 1

Partner Universities in Project SCILLA

Because short and intensive CLIL professional workshops for teachers have been found to be less effective (Yuan & Lo, 2023), we gradually progressed through a variety of collaborative activities over a nine-month period, 72 hours of face-to-face and virtual work. Below, we describe four phases of this longitudinal project, whereby participants and workshop facilitators learned about CLIL as an instructional methodology, planned for its application, and embedded it in their programs.

3 Overview of the Special Issue

The six articles in this special issue report on various aspects of the collaboration between American and Kazakhstani colleagues described above. The studies explore how international professional development is situated within the ever-evolving EMI landscape (Curle et al., 2024), highlighting the need to reevaluate assumptions in EMI language policies.

Goodman, Assylbekova, and Yembergenova (Article 1) examine the macro level of EMI policy in Kazakhstan, investigating how it affects ideological and implementational spaces (Hornberger, 2020) for multilingual use of Kazakh, Russian, and English in higher education. Through comparative document analysis of 12 legal documents and curriculum texts of undergraduate and graduate programs across 12 universities, their findings reveal the rapid transformation of teaching within Kazakhstani higher education institutions as undergraduate and postgraduate teacher programs continue to adopt CLIL to teach subjects such as physics, chemistry, biology, and mechanical engineering. Nevertheless, many programs misinterpreted CLIL, which led to ill-prepared educators facing a lack of resources and support. The authors recommend researchers and policymakers optimize multilingual learning opportunities through concrete CLIL development.

In the first empirical study with participants in Project SCILLA, Montgomery, De Costa, and Novitskaya (Article 2) explore how two Kazakhstani university STEM teachers’ conceptualize CLIL in relation to their professional knowledge and personal experiences to create their CLIL teacher identity. Using a developmental pathways approach (Comer et al., 2004), the authors illustrate how their teacher participants make sense of and are affected by their participation in SCILLA workshops through six dimensions of professional care. The authors recommend professional development not only attend to teachers’ identity development but also incorporate opportunities for teachers to “interact, commiserate, and problem-solve across disciplinary boundaries” as they learn to exercise CLIL principles in their respective classrooms.

Novitskaya, Gordon, Hartman, and Green-Eneix (Article 3) investigate how Kazakhstani STEM teachers implement online resources to facilitate synchronous CLIL classrooms. The authors leverage the technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) framework with the CLIL principles to present how their participants organize, represent, and adapt their teaching online through the meaningful implementation of technology. The findings showcase teachers’ practices and strategies that intersect language, content, and technology, highlighting the need for professional development to incorporate technology support. The authors urge future CLIL professional development to incorporate technology and the ways to support teachers to meaningfully implement these resources in their respective teaching situations.

Green-Eneix and De Costa’s study (Article 4) examines a SCILLA participant’s responses to instructional and emotional expectations as their institution implements EMI. The authors adopt a poststructuralist-discursive view of emotions (Benesch, 2017), and explore professional vulnerability as a facet of emotion labor teachers must perform. The findings present how EMI coincides with neoliberal linguistic pressures, and how professional vulnerability requires strategies as more universities adopt EMI-TNHE policies. In light of these findings, the authors suggest that professional development series consider integrating both reflexive and supportive activities that allow teachers to meaningfully engage with their structural conditions pressuring change in their teaching practices.

In a conceptual piece, Gordon (Article 5) calls for us to reconsider the commonly used metaphor of “cultivation” to describe the development of education professionals, and proposes "forest gardening" as a metaphor to capture how professional development must sustain a self-sufficient ecosystem. Sustainability is foregrounded in this conceptualization of CLIL professional development, and Gordon concludes the paper by considering ways in which teachers, teacher educators, and administrators can embrace language policies such as EMI if they wish without disturbing the multilingual and multicultural soil.

Banegas concludes this special issue with a commentary (Article 6) that further places the empirical pieces within the larger trends of CLIL and teacher professional development. Banegas brings his extensive research experience to bear, arguing that as a teaching approach, CLIL continues to be a means to support multilingual and multicultural pluralism if the necessary support and resources are available.

We believe this special issue presents a complex picture of EMI that acknowledges its light and dark sides (Block, 2022). Moreover, it explores how CLIL professional development in multilingual contexts like Kazakhstan must engage with multiple scales of policy suffused with competing priorities and possibilities. Project SCILLA reflects our attempt at sustainable, culturally-relevant professional development and might be a resource for other similar initiatives to embrace multilingualism in educational spaces. We see a clear need for more research within language policy and teacher education to consider how faculty can be given transdisciplinary opportunities to collaborate with their content and linguistic peers.