In content and language integrated learning (CLIL) classrooms, it is assumed that non-language content subjects provide more authentic communicative contexts for students to learn a foreign/second/additional language (L2). However, learning abstract concepts and academic language in an L2 simultaneously is also challenging for CLIL students. It is thus important for CLIL teachers to unpack and repack both abstract concepts and academic discourse for the students. ‘Semantic waves’, which model classroom practices of both unpacking and repacking, is arguably a key to understanding cumulative knowledge-building. Applying the concepts of semantic profiles and semantic waves, this paper analyses the classroom discourse of two CLIL science lessons in Hong Kong. In one lesson, the semantic profile mainly consists of downward shifts. The teacher adopted various useful strategies to unpack science concepts, especially with multimodalities, everyday L2 and students’ L1 resources. Yet, there was limited repacking. In contrast, some repacking was observed in another lesson, where the teacher provided explicit instruction on academic language and guided students through academic writing tasks. A semantic wave can thus be observed there. These findings on strategies for unpacking and repacking provide significant insights into knowledge building in CLIL contexts, and may hence illuminate CLIL pedagogical practices. © 2020 Informa UK Limited.

Content and language integrated learning (CLIL) is characterized by using students’ additional language (L2) as the medium of instruction of non-language content subjects. In recent decades, this type of program has been gaining worldwide popularity, especially in English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) contexts, because of the assumption that it can facilitate L2 learning. However, this assumption may not be realized in many classrooms in EFL contexts, where both teachers and students are often not well-prepared to cope with the heavy linguistic demands to learn content and language simultaneously. Owing to a combination of sociopolitical and socioeconomic forces, Hong Kong has a rather long history of practicing some form of CLIL in secondary schools, in the form of English-medium instruction (EMI) education. Following some recent changes in the government’s medium of instruction policies, there are different models and practices of EMI in Hong Kong schools to accommodate students with different English proficiency levels and also the expectations of different stakeholders. This chapter will illustrate these different models and practices and discuss their implications and challenges for English language learning, content learning, and teacher education. Copyright © 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

In recent years, the practice of using a second/foreign language to teach non-language content subjects (e.g. science) has become increasingly popular, especially in English-as-foreign-language (EFL) contexts. Such a practice can be categorised as 'Content and Language Integrated Learning' (CLIL). However, EFL learners may encounter difficulties in accessing content knowledge through English, especially with regard to the subject-specific academic literacy. Hence, content subject teachers may need to provide more scaffolding to help EFL learners in CLIL bridge the gap between everyday language and academic literacy. A genre-based approach, which emphasises contextualised language learning and use, serves as a useful framework to integrate content and language teaching in CLIL. This chapter shares an example of how university language specialists collaborated with science teachers in one secondary school in Hong Kong, where CLIL is practised. Drawing insights from the genre-based approach, the university-school collaborative team designed and tried out a set of materials to help grade 8 students write a piece of sequential explanation text. Lesson observations revealed how teachers integrated language scaffolding into their science lessons, and students' sample work and teachers' reflection showed that the materials were useful for helping the students develop science literacy. These findings yield significant implications for literacy development in science education and language across the curriculum in CLIL.

This study takes a rarely employed learner's angle in examining how students are learning in the English Medium Instruction (EMI) classroom. Particularly, the study tapped into students' listening strategy use when comprehending the teacher input, a context that is underexplored for strategy research and yet highly important because teacher input predominates in the EMI classroom. An EMI class of Grade 11 Biology in Hong Kong was recruited. Through lesson observations and stimulated recall interviews with a purposively selected sample of eight students, a taxonomy of listening strategies in EMI was constructed. The taxonomy reveals the uniqueness of listening to the teacher in EMI context due to the non-existence of planning and prediction strategies, the identification of novel strategies, and the classification of content-mediated and language-mediated cognitive strategies. Factoring in students' linguistic knowledge and Biology achievement, the findings indicated the usefulness for students to deploy a range of language-mediated, content-mediated and metacognitive strategies in combination. This paper ends with implications for future research and pedagogy in order to make EMI learning and teaching more successful. Copyright © 2023 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Listening strategies have been explored almost exclusively in contexts where second/foreign (L2) learners listen to audio-recordings. The limited research in understanding teacher input in the classroom is unjustified given how pervasive teacher talk is, particularly in Asian contexts. This area of research is even more scarce in the increasingly popular content and language integrated learning (CLIL) classroom, where students learn content subjects (e.g., science) through their L2. Considering its dual focus on content and L2 learning, it would be interesting to investigate whether CLIL learners may deploy some new listening strategies and how much they are drawing upon their top-down (more meaning-focused) and bottom-up (more language-focused) processing strategies. This study sets out to explore how learners deploy listening strategies to understand teacher talk in the CLIL biology classroom in Hong Kong. Data was collected through lesson observations and stimulated recall interviews with grade 11 students. Findings reveal that students deploy some novel strategies which are more relevant to the CLIL classroom (e.g., decoding subject-specific terminology by breaking down "biodiversity" to "bio" + "diversity"), and these strategies include both top-down and bottom-up ones. There are some teacher-aided strategies such as aided selective attention, which involves the teacher explicitly prompting students to attend to certain keywords. This study, therefore, highlights the interactive nature of listening to the teacher input in the CLIL classroom and the pivotal role of the teacher in achieving the dual goal of content and language learning. Pedagogical implications and professional development in CLIL are highlighted. Copyright © 2020 AsiaTEFL.

As the content knowledge of English language learners and immigrant students is assessed in their less proficient language, the validity and fairness of assessments related to those students have been widely discussed. However, such assessment issues have not received much attention in rapidly expanding bilingual education programmes, where students learn content subjects through a second/foreign/additional language (L2) and are often assessed in that language. This paper addresses this research gap by examining the mediating effect of language of testing on students’ performance in content subject assessments. 387 question items in the Biology papers of a public examination in Hong Kong were analysed according to their cognitive and linguistic demands. The performance of 480 students (half taking the test in their first language and half in their L2) on the questions with different demands was then analysed with MANOVA and multiple regression. The results show that linguistic demands, especially productive linguistic demands (e.g. writing sentences and texts), had a more significant effect on the performance of students taking the test in their L2. These results underscore the role played by language in the academic achievement of bilingual education students, which in turn illuminate valid assessment design and pedagogy in these programmes. Copyright © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

In Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) programmes, students learn content knowledge and a second/foreign language (L2) simultaneously. It follows that both content and language are assessed, although research on how to do so remains scarce. This study explores the interplay between cognitive and linguistic demands of CLIL assessments. Having analysed over 4900 questions in Science/Biology textbooks, workbooks and examination papers in Hong Kong, we observed that junior secondary assessments were dominated by low-level cognitive (i.e. recall of knowledge) and linguistic (i.e. no production or word-level production) demands, whereas senior secondary assessments required higher-order thinking skills (i.e. application and analysis of knowledge) expressed in sentences or even texts. Also, based on the analysis of 70 junior secondary students' performance in school examination papers, we noticed a potential hindrance of linguistic demands to students' performance in CLIL assessments. These findings together underscore the integral role of language in CLIL assessments and raise questions about the adequacy of existing pedagogical practices in preparing students to tackle both cognitive and linguistic demands in CLIL assessments, particularly when they proceed to higher grade levels where the demands in both dimensions leap. These have significant implications for CLIL assessment design, pedagogy and teacher education. Copyright ©Routledge.

In Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) programmes, students are expected to master content knowledge and language simultaneously. The worldwide popularity of this kind of programme has called for professional development, particularly for content subject teachers who have to shoulder some responsibilities of language teaching in CLIL. There have been several frameworks or proposals for professional development of CLIL teachers. Yet, empirical studies investigating the effectiveness of CLIL professional development programmes remain scarce. This gap is particularly important, since the relationship between professional development and teacher change is complicated and there are various factors affecting whether and how teacher would change. This study implemented a 6-month professional development programme for a group of content subject teachers in CLIL in Hong Kong. With data gathered with questionnaires, interviews, lesson observations and post-lesson reflections, this paper reports the trajectory of three case teachers who seemed to experience different degrees of changes in beliefs and language awareness. These differences could be explained by the influence of such factors as school context, learning experience and subject discipline. This study yields important implications for teacher education in CLIL and teacher change.
[Copyright of International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism is the property of Routledge.]

Content-based education programmes, in which a second/foreign language (L2) is used as the medium of instruction when teaching non-language content subjects, aim at both content and L2 learning. With such dual goal in mind, and with the rapid expansion of the programmes to contexts where students might have only basic L2 proficiency, there have been consistent calls for reconsidering the roles of first language (L1) in the teaching and learning process. The functions of L1 in content-based classrooms have been well documented, but it is necessary to have a more systematic approach to planning and using L1. This paper seeks to address this gap by applying the notions of 'curriculum genres' and 'task structure' when analysing patterns of teachers' use of L1 and L2 in a collection of content subject lessons observed in English-medium secondary schools in Hong Kong. With illustrative episodes presented in this paper, we would argue that 'curriculum genres' and 'task structure' can serve as useful tools for both researchers and teachers to analyse and critically reflect on patterns of pedagogic practices and language use in content-based classrooms. These will have significant implications for future research on using L1 and illuminate effective pedagogy in content-based education.
[Copyright of International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism is the property of Routledge.]

In Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) classrooms where students' L2 proficiency has not reached the threshold level, teachers have been observed to use L1 to assist students in grasping specific technical terms and abstract concepts. It is argued to be a 'realistic' approach to the learning problems caused by students' limited L2 proficiency, particularly in English-as-a-foreign-language contexts. Nonetheless, researchers have also warranted 'judicious' and 'principled' use of L1 so that both content and language learning are facilitated. The question thus remains is whether teachers can use L1 appropriately to suit their students' needs. This study seeks to address this question. It includes data from 30 Grade 10 lessons in Hong Kong CLIL classrooms, where students' L2 proficiency varied considerably. Using both quantitative and qualitative analyses, this study shows that when teaching students with limited L2 proficiency, teachers used a significant proportion of L1 in lessons to explain the subject content, interact with students and develop students' L2 metalinguistic awareness. In contrast, with students highly proficient in L2, teachers used little L1, mainly to provide translation equivalents for L2 subject-specific vocabulary items. This study thus shows that teachers seemed to be sensitive when making use of students' existing linguistic repertoires.
[Copyright of International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2014.988112]