Towards a re-conceptualisation of the roles of EFL teachers in CLIL Secondary settingsa genre-based pedagogy for developing academic literacies

Résumé

English has become much more than a foreign language. In our global world, the English language is now an indispensable tool which opens up professional, educational and mobility opportunities for citizens. In this context, multilingualism is understood as the ability to communicate functionally in a variety of situations by mobilising their linguistic resources and repertoire resulting from dynamic and plurilingual trajectories (Cenoz & Gorter, 2020). It is for that reason that long-established pedagogies in the field of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) are being challenged by the need to look for approaches which better meet the linguistic demands of our globalised society. In the last two decades, Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) has spread across Europe as the most effective educational approach to provide learners with the linguistic tools which society demands from them. Since CLIL consists of teaching content subjects through a foreign language with dual aims (Coyle et al., 2010), CLIL classrooms are regarded as a natural environment for foreign language acquisition. Thus, CLIL has been considered the new communicative approach (Graddol, 2006; Pérez-Vidal, 2009) because it creates favourable conditions for authentic language use in ways which EFL cannot offer. After years of enthusiasm because of the substantial benefits of CLIL, it is now time to examine the areas for improvement. And one of them is precisely language. Although it was initially supposed to be the vehicle for communication which would be acquired naturally in the classroom, the extensive research and years of implementation have demonstrated that more explicit attention to language is still missing and that engaging in content subjects entails particular literacy in subject-specific academic discourse. To develop this proficiency, language has to be scaffolded properly, which is not always the reality of CLIL classrooms. In parallel, EFL instruction and EFL teachers, particularly in Secondary Education, seem to be disconnected from what is going on in the CLIL classroom. Although they are the language specialists, the role and responsibilities of EFL teachers working in CLIL Secondary settings have not been sufficiently regulated. In view of the need for more research on the changing roles of EFL teachers, this study sets out to explore the redefinition of such roles, particularly when they are mediated by need to attend specific language demands in CLIL Secondary contexts. This general objective encompasses three specific objectives. First of all, it is the purpose of this study to identify the shift of roles which EFL teachers may have experienced since the implementation of CLIL, from both top-down and bottom-up perspectives. Secondly, the transformation of teachers’ professional roles cannot be disassociated from their cognition, particularly their set of beliefs about the role of language, its relation with content or their own role as language teachers. This aspect becomes a cornerstone in the process of analysing the potential success of an hypothetical curricular remodelling and reshaping of the teachers’ job. For this reason, this study aims at investigating language teachers' understanding of their own roles and the impact they may have on desired practices. Finally, in order to analyse how EFL teachers can provide specific scaffolding for disciplinary literacy, it is the purpose of this research to examine possibilities of implementing a genre-based learning pedagogy in the EFL classroom. To do so, this study focuses in the context of Madrid CLIL Programme in Secondary Education settings. Six English teachers working in three different high schools take part in this multi-case study, which consists of the analysis of different sets of data. The English curriculum and the three school syllabi for this subject were analysed in order to find out whether the existing policy prescribes specific responsibilities for English teachers in CLIL contexts. Then, initial questionnaires were administered to ascertain whether some new roles suggested by the literature are already being enacted, and to unravel some of the participants’ beliefs about CLIL. Then, the participants tested a pedagogical intervention which put into practice a genre-based pedagogy focused on the development of a History school genre. After that, interviews were conducted with the participants, which were later analysed following content analysis procedures. Questions related to the three specific objectives were included in these interviews, including the feasibility of the genre-based pedagogy as a systematic teaching practice for the future. The results show that some guidelines in the curriculum seem to indicate that we are moving towards a more proactive, collaborative and advisory role of EFL teachers. However, the daily-life reality reported by the participants reveals that much is yet left to be done for EFL teachers to assume more agency. When it comes to their vision of their own role, the participating teachers display positive attitudes towards CLIL and feel responsible for the scaffolding and development of the specific linguistic competences needed by their learners in CLIL context subjects. Furthermore, the participants acknowledge the benefits which implementing a genre-based approach in the EFL subject may have to build academic and subject-specific literacy and see it as something doable in the foreseeable future. Drawing on these findings, this thesis offers a final discussion on the implications which these findings have for policy and curriculum development, teacher education, teacher cognition as a key element and future directions for genre-based pedagogies as the way forward for EFL in CLIL settings.