Sixth International Conference on Immersion and Dual Language Education: Connecting Research and Practice Across Contexts

Paper/Best Practice Session (1 hour)

Dutch, German, or English

One-Way Second/Foreign Language Immersion

Supported by a theoretical model, we: (1) examine subject teacher and language teacher pedagogic collaboration towards integration through teacher, headteacher and learner perspectives from a Belgian francophone secondary school; and (2) report on tools development with and for "dual-teams" of teachers from several schools for co-constructing effective content and language integration.

A pedagogic challenge at the heart of dual language education is, for teachers, to support integrated learning of and through an additional language (Coyle et al., 2010). In contexts where subject teachers and language teachers ‘share’ learners at different times in the timetable, an implication is the need for them to collaborate towards co-constructing the integration of their disciplines. So what comes into play and how to help make it work?

This paper considers such teacher collaboration in two ways. Firstly, how it is understood, perceived and experienced in one specific context. Supported by a theoretical model (Chopey-Paquet, 2015), we examine multiperspectival data from a francophone Belgian secondary school whose dual language program (at least two subjects each year) is through Dutch as an additional language. It is an urban setting with a socio-economically disadvantaged student population. Data were collected from interviews with 4 teachers (subject and language), the headteacher and 64 students (9 focus-groups). The analyses focus on convergences/divergences from these key players regarding teacher collaboration. What factors are perceived as enabling and/or limiting the teachers’ developing effective pedagogic partnership in their context? Probing understandings of integration, what roles do these practitioners need to play and with what support for purposefully progressing in their pedagogic collaboration towards co-constructing integration of content and language, to their ‘shared’ students’ benefit? Findings provide insight from the players’ perspectives and illustrate complex interacting factors, conditions and processes.

Secondly, building on the research we report on an on-going project. We are developing practical tools with and for ‘dual-teams’ of subject and language teachers from several francophone Belgian secondary schools to support their collaborative partnership and practices. Focus-groups and practitioner-based inquiry methods are employed to cultivate the teachers’ reflexive analysis and deepening understandings for co-constructing integration from a pluriliteracies perspective (Meyer et al., 2015).