Abstract
The national curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2007) requires secondary school teachers in New Zealand to promote academic language learning in their content areas. However, it is unclear how subject teachers interpret this expectation which is intended to accelerate the learning of students with English as an additional language (EALs).
Using questionnaires, interviews and observations, this qualitative case study investigated what high school teachers considered to be good teaching practice that was likely to enhance the learning of EALs in their senior subject classes. A thematic analysis revealed that these teachers held polarised beliefs about the nature of knowledge and how best to teach it. Finding such a polarisation of beliefs prompted me to reconfigure the multiple cases into two composite cases which better reflected these disciplinary orientations. A fresh analysis was performed upon the two new cases to evaluate how closely teachers’ beliefs aligned to understandings of effective language teaching arising from educational linguistics.
The dominant epistemology held by each teacher’s curriculum community, such as whether knowledge is developed sequentially or by negotiation, appeared to influence their engagement with systematic language teaching. Teachers of negotiated subjects were more likely to engage in practices that enhance language acquisition such as generating small group interactions where students are required to talk. On the other hand, it was more important to teachers from sequential disciplines that their students gained independent mastery of subject matter.
Because their pedagogical content knowledge was deeply ingrained, and their familiarity with disciplinary linguistic knowledge was limited, all of the teachers tended to overlook opportunities to focus their students’ attention on the language of their content area.
This indicates that teacher educators need to understand subject teachers’ curriculum-oriented epistemology and disciplinary practices before attempting to engage teachers in learning pedagogical language knowledge.
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Gleeson, M. ‘It’s the nature of the subject’: Secondary teachers’ disciplinary beliefs and decisions about teaching academic language in their content classes. AJLL 38, 104–114 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03651961
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03651961