English is widely used as a medium of instruction in tertiary education all over the world. Thus, many subject specialists without a background in language teaching find themselves having to teach their subjects in English (Yuan, 2021), often without adequate preparation or support. If there are language teachers working in the same institution or department, it often falls to them to provide language expertise and support to their subject teacher colleagues, resulting in "a 'natural' need […] to collaborate" (Lo, 2020, p. 36) across disciplinary boundaries.
Such cross-disciplinary collaborations can be challenging for a variety of reasons. Gustafsson et al. (2011) name "infrastructural, institutional, epistemological, disciplinary, rhetorical" reasons, and Wilkinson (2018) acknowledges that "collaboration across disciplines is hard work and demands much of those who try to achieve it" (p. 609), all the more so as the respective roles of content teachers and language teachers are often not clearly defined. Thus, researchers have sounded a "clarion call for partnerships between EMI teachers (content specialists) and English language teachers/researchers (language specialists)" (Yuan, 2021, p. 2) to improve the quality of EMI teaching".
In our talk, we will present a cross-disciplinary collaboration model inspired by collaborative action research (CAR) (Norton 2009) developed at a computer science department at a University of Applied Sciences in Austria. We will outline the roles which language teachers at the institution and external collaborators (teacher educators and language specialists) play in creating a space of trust for the professional development of content specialists. We will use Davison's (2006) framework to evaluate the effectiveness of the collaboration.
We will also highlight the crucial role of access to current research in linguistics since we believe it provides content teachers with the opportunity to enhance their understanding and awareness of the epistemic function of language. We will outline how this helps them to eventually see different forms of collaboration as effective ways of improving their teaching practice. CAR-based collaboration models such the present one therefore have great potential to contribute to teachers' professional development and to improve the quality of ICLHE teaching overall.
References:
Davison, C. (2006). Collaboration between ESL and content teachers: How do we know when we are doing it right?. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 9(4), 454-475.
Gustafsson, M., Eriksson, A., Räisänen, C., Stenberg, A. C., Jacobs, C., Wright, J., & Winberg, C. (2011). Collaborating for content and language integrated learning: The situated character of faculty collaboration and student learning. Across the Disciplines, 8(3). http://hdl.handle.net/11189/4925
Norton, L. (2009). Action research in teaching and learning: A practical guide to conducting pedagogical research in universities. Routledge.
Lo, Y. Y. (2020). Professional development of CLIL teachers. Springer.
Wilkinson, R. (2018). Content and language integration at universities? Collaborative reflections. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 21(5), 607-615.
Yuan, R. (2021). Promoting English-as-a-medium-of-instruction (EMI) Teacher Development in Higher Education: What Can Language Specialists Do and Become? RELC Journal. https://doi.org/10.1177/0033688220980173.
