Analyzing Teachers’ Discursive Participation in Co-taught Science-and-English CLIL Classrooms

Abstract

Two of the most important educational competences endorsed by the European Commission are a command of at least three languages and an understanding of Science. In response to the first demand, new foreign-language teaching approaches have been promoted, such as Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL). In Catalonia, CLIL projects often aim to integrate the teaching of Science and English as a foreign language. Science-and-English CLIL projects in primary education represent a big challenge for teachers. The need to promote dialogue between disciplines and collaboration between experts in both fields arises. Our study explores the potential of co-teaching as a strategy to help build a Science-and-English CLIL project. We are interested in the interaction that occurs between co-teachers from different disciplines while they try to integrate the teaching of English and Science, and how this approach enriches the CLIL classroom and the professional development of those teachers. We take a methodological approach based on the discourse studies tradition from a sociocultural perspective. In this chapter, we present the analytical tool developed to analyze the discursive collaboration of three pairs of co-teachers, as well as some of the results obtained from our study. These results show how the participation models develop and how they can be transferred. Finally, in the discussion and conclusions section, we refer to the benefits that co-teaching brings to the CLIL project.