This paper examines how UK models of CLIL have “travelled” to inform a knowledge base for professional learning in Australian contexts. However, it then explores how the same courseware, initially developed to support Australian-based professional learning, is being further recast for teachers working with content and language integration in China.
CLIL has been significant in helping to clarify and distill strategies and professional knowledge at the heart of high-quality immersion practices, such as Coyle’s 4C’s CLIL instructional framework (e.g., Coyle, Hood, & Marsh, 2010). For the Australian education system, it has shifted the focus from how schools must be (re)configured to create structural conditions to support high-quality immersion provision (e.g., at least 50% of the curriculum in the TL, continuity across levels, etc. (Baker & Wright, 2018)), to instructional decisions teachers can make for themselves, as agents in their own classrooms, to successfully bring content/language together given the conditions for any one teaching/learning episode. Focused on the qualities of pedagogical interaction, there is potential for CLIL in any setting where teachers have students to teach. In Victoria, wide-scale systemic government-sponsored CLIL professional learning#_ftn1has enabled the gradual expansion of bilingual approaches for languages within mainstream school settings#_ftn2, and the normalization of bilingual models within language teaching professional community#_ftn3. This paper draws on policy sociology (particularly the concepts of policy “transfer”, “borrowing”, and “learning” (Steiner-Khamsi, 2012; Lingard, 2010) to first examine how models of CLIL pedagogy, developed in the UK, have “travelled” into the Australian teacher education space to offer a knowledge base for professional learning successful within that context. It then explores how this same courseware, originally designed to support teachers’ professional learning in Australia, is now being further recast to support teachers working with language and content integration in China. With the knowledge base of language teacher education being highly situated (Freeman, 2018), the analysis aims to identify how and why certain aspects of CLIL professional knowledge have remained relatively consistent, while other elements have been subject to adaptation, and causes why in terms the relationship between knowledge/context. #_ftnref1 E.g., https://www.bastow.vic.edu.au/professional-learning/content-and-language-integrated-learning, https://www.education.vic.gov.au/school/teachers/teachingresources/discipline/languages/Pages/proflearn.aspx#link49 #_ftnref2 E.g., https://fuse.education.vic.gov.au/Search/Results?AssociatedPackageId=&QueryText=CLIL&SearchScope=All, https://fuse.education.vic.gov.au/Resource/LandingPage?ObjectId=73560789-d2fd-4060-91e7-e17503413d0b #_ftnref3 E.g., https://clillanguageteachers.weebly.com/
