Exploring the challenges faced by language teachers adopting CLIL in an EFL context

The educational approach, CLIL, aims to enhance learners' foreign language competence and to facilitate their acquisition of content knowledge. While the implementation of CLIL has been widely examined, ranging from the design of CLIL materials to its effectiveness, the practices are often obscured by clouds of challenges due to the nature of dual learning goals. Thus, working with language teachers in Taiwan in designing CLIL materials with social issues integrated, I aim to unveil, determine, explore and discuss the challenges. Specifically, the participants were two language teachers, one teaching at a primary school in Central Taiwan and the other at a lower secondary school in Northern Taiwan, as well as their grade four and grade seven students, respectively. The data were collected over a three-month period through semistructured interviews, lesson materials, meeting logs, classroom observation, learning artefacts and students' written feedback. The findings reveal the challenges encountered before, during and after each implementation. Adopting the CLIL approach in an EFL context is not impossible, but at the same time significantly constrained by such factors as time, school policies, learners' English levels, and so forth. These factors and challenges, if taken into consideration, would shed light on preparing teachers to implement CLIL. Therefore, this study suggests that while it is necessary to develop a curriculum based on the policy agenda set out by the government calling for bilingualism with English as the second language in an EFL context, this top-down approach needs to be challenged with critical lenses by, firstly, identifying, examining and addressing the challenges to bring out the best of CLIL.