Volume 48, Issue 1

CLIL, which stands for Content and Language Integrated Learning, is an instructional approach that gives ample curricular and pedagogical attention to content and language outcomes in multilingual educational settings. Increasingly, it is heralded as a way to responsibly enact top-down English-Medium-of-Instruction (EMI) policies at the university level, where teachers and students are tasked with developing their English proficiency while remaining competitive in the international job market. However, teachers and teacher educators hoping to implement this approach in their science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) content courses face significant challenges. This article serves as an introduction to a guest-edited special issue that reports on several aspects related to a project of international collaboration called Project SCILLA, an acronym for “STEM Content Integrated with Language-Learning Activities”. We first provide a brief overview of the project, which was developed and carried out in collaboration between Michigan State University and a consortium of 10 rural universities in Kazakhstan as a way to support STEM educators who wish to adapt their teaching practices to Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Education. We then offer an overview of the six articles that comprise the special issue, and call for deliberate and dialogic international collaboration as a way to support teachers responding to language policy demands.

Since joining the Bologna Process in 2010, the Kazakhstani government has increasingly encouraged universities to develop full or partial (i.e., trilingual) English-Medium Instruction (EMI) programs. In other contexts, Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) has simultaneously been advocated as an approach to teaching English and additional languages in higher education and treated as a separate entity from EMI (Macaro, 2018). Whether CLIL is advocated in policy or practice in Kazakhstani EMI contexts remains an empirical question. The purpose of this paper is to provide a systematic overview of national policy documents and select institutional curriculum documents. The analysis will consider not only concrete policies and pedagogies but also ideological and implementational spaces (Hornberger, 2020) for CLIL pedagogy development. The paper concludes with recommendations for what may be possible and beneficial for the implementation of CLIL pedagogies in Kazakhstani higher education.

As universities in Kazakhstan continue to address the challenges that come with developing English-medium instruction (EMI) programs, university Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) teachers need to develop capacities to teach in English, while their English teacher counterparts need to develop content-specific pedagogical knowledge. Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) pedagogies, defined as the integration of both language and content curricular goals, have emerged as a vehicle to facilitate this development for both types of teachers. However, what it means to be a CLIL teacher may vary considerably as teachers leverage their professional knowledge and personal experiences. We, therefore, explore teachers’ conceptions of CLIL and how their disciplinary, linguistic, and pedagogical backgrounds enable or burden them to forge a “CLIL teacher” identity. This qualitative study illustrates the salient points of the journeys taken by two university teachers, one a specialist in oil and gas, the other an English teacher and teacher educator. Drawing on extended one-on-one interviews, we present two teachers’ experiences through a series of CLIL-informed workshops. Using a multidisciplinary analytical framework, we map the ways in which the two teacher participants negotiate their identities in relation to CLIL. The findings highlight the importance of understanding teacher experiences, particularly their language learning backgrounds, attitudes toward supporting student learning, and relationships with their colleagues as they work to adapt to teaching English and STEM subjects in university EMI contexts.

As world events have morphed teachers’ roles within English medium of instruction (EMI) contexts to incorporate more online teaching practices, teachers’ integration of digital tools has faced technological and curricular challenges. While previous research has examined the integration of digital tools in face-to-face and hybrid EMI settings (e. g., Finardi, 2015; O’Dowd, 2018), more research is needed to understand the familiarization process teachers engage in as they implement fully-online teaching to support their content and language integrated learning (CLIL) teaching. As part of a larger project, this case study sets out to fill this gap by examining the practices and perspectives of 30 Kazakhstani university teachers who adopted CLIL approaches while needing to adapt to fully-online teaching contexts. Using the concept of technological pedagogical content knowledge (Mishra & Koehler, 2006) in tandem with Ball et al.’s (2016) seven CLIL principles as a framework, this study thematically analyzed workshop artifacts, survey responses, semi-structured interview transcripts, and videos from online class lessons to find that teachers were mediators and curators of content, language, pedagogy, and digital tools. The findings offer pedagogical insights for the implementation of professional development (PD) to prepare teachers to meaningfully curate and mediate technology into their CLIL pedagogy to teach content within EMI contexts.

The adoption of content and language integrated learning (CLIL) practices has expanded in recent years as higher education institutions adopt a top-down English medium of instruction (EMI) language policy in the hope of entering the international knowledge market (De Costa et al., 2022; Isidro & Lasagabaster, 2019). However, research focusing on the effects of EMI policy on content teachers needing to implement CLIL, especially within trilingual contexts such as Kazakhstan, has been marginal despite drastic alterations to teachers’ professional context and expectations (Karabassova, 2022b). Such changes may result in teachers’ feelings of professional vulnerability—an emotion that often arises when changes in professional expectations and professional context disrupt one’s professional identity and pedagogical practices (Kelchtermans, 2009). Our case study focuses on the professional vulnerability experienced by a Kazakhstani in-service teacher as she negotiated a CLIL pedagogy for the first time. Relying on semi-structured interviews, recorded classroom observation, field notes, and developed material, our findings highlight how macro (e.g., societal) and meso (e.g., institutional) language policies can affect teachers’ lived experiences and pedagogical practices within their classrooms. Lastly, we provide ways in which administrators can assist teachers in overcoming professional vulnerability as institutions adopt language policies such as CLIL.

Cultivation metaphors that compare teachers and students to gardeners and plants, respectively, have a long presence in the field of education. While such metaphors can be used to represent learner-centered pedagogies in which a teacher fosters the growth of their students, there is also a darker side to cultivation metaphors. For instance, Zipory (2020) argues that characteristics of agriculture’s grain economy—like repetitiveness, coercion, and lack of diversity—can be imposed onto education. Following Zipory’s call for the forest to serve as a more apt metaphorical trajectory for education, I propose using the forest garden as a middle ground between the traditional garden and the natural forest. To highlight the potential usefulness of the forest garden metaphor in education, I explore its application as related to teacher professional development (PD), specifically content and language integrated learning (CLIL) PD. By reflecting on the design and outcomes of Project SCILLA, a CLIL PD program for Kazakhstani university instructors, as well as CLIL PD more broadly, I demonstrate how the forest garden metaphor conceptualizes the relationships and power dynamics between and across various stakeholders in education in response to global rhetoric, national and local policies, and interpersonal interactions. By emulating the sustainable forest garden’s principles of planning and intentionality, localization, interconnectedness, diversity, creativity, and growth from decay, stakeholders can (re)shape the policies and practices of multilingual, multicultural education systems. In addition, education researchers can use a metaphorical forest garden lens to better appreciate the complexities at play within dynamic educational landscapes.

This mixed-methods study presents a needs analysis to investigate the workplace English language needs of medical students in China who are learning and using English as non-native speakers, the circumstances in which the various language skills are required, and stakeholders’ perceived workplace preparedness in the light of language-related instructional provision during medical training. A leading university in China was chosen as the study case. Altogether, 294 online questionnaires were collected from undergraduate medical students, graduate medical students and recent graduates working as physicians, and 33 semi-structured individual interviews were conducted with undergraduate medical students, graduate medical students, recent graduates working as physicians, medical teachers, English for Medical Purposes (EMP) teachers, program leaders and English-speaking patients. Results showed that in addition to physicians experiencing pressure to publish scientific articles internationally, participants attached greater importance to physicians’ oral English communication ability, especially in undertaking clinical consultations in English, working with medical interpreters or acting as ad hoc interpreters. The participants also reported a lack of relevant EMP courses or trainings available at this university. Given these communicative events that physicians face in China, EMP courses need to include training in these specific areas.

Conceptualizations of empathy have been most fully developed in a variety of fields in recent years. Many approaches to empathy dwell on the cognitive, affective, and behavioral aspects, the intra-psychic processes that cause one to feel emotions more like those of another, rather than the interpersonal functions of empathy, which may be influenced by the variables during the communication process. Therefore, this study designed and implemented a virtual ethnographic intercultural project between Chinese and American university students with WeChat as the main social medium. The whole process included three phases: exploring the unique cultural experiences of Chinese and American students, seeking an empathy based on commonality and seeking a relational empathy, a form of harmonization and integration through interactive and continuous intercultural dialogues. During the process, the method of discourse-centered online ethnography (DCOE) was employed, which involved systematic observation and interaction with WeChat users. We used the collective data to analyze how relational empathy was developed through understanding cultural differences, seeking similarities, and creating a third culture by engaging students in a substantial and dynamic natural and interactive setting. The study shows that the most challenging process to nurture relational empathy is to move from Phases One and Two to Phase Three, during which, some strategies to build relational empathy need to be taught and practiced in a specific cultural setting. In conclusion, virtual ethnographic intercultural teaching is an effective approach to offer students a long-term intercultural dialogue and insight into developing shared meaning, or dynamic relational empathy with culturally different others.