Mentoring Bilingual Teachers in Content and Language-Integrated Learning Programs Through the SIOP

Introduction

Content-based education programs have exponentially grown in the last decades, particularly in Europe, where these programs have coined the label ‘bilingual’ to refer to bilingual education in majority languages, where two majority languages are used to teach curricular content in mainstream education (Baker & Wright, 2017) to meet the needs of the ever-changing and multilingual societies of the 21^st century. Considering the plurilingual nature of the European Union and the linguistic richness and diversity of its countries and citizens, bilingual education there means that students learn some content in their first language and some content in an additional language, through the Content and Language Integrated Learning approach (henceforth, CLIL). In fact, Baker & Wright (2017) underline the similarities between CLIL and content-based instruction in the United States “in that the focus is on learning a new language through the medium of content area instruction in that language” (p. 235). In Spain, bilingual programs are envisioned as the answer to the low levels of proficiency in a foreign language —commonly, English (from now on, EFL)— that most individuals still had after years of EFL learning. However, the rapid growth of these programs in the country outpaced teacher provision (Dalton-Puffer et al, 2022) and only recently did teacher training began to consolidate. Teacher training for educators in content-based or content and language integrated learning (CLIL) programs, for the most part, is voluntary and at a postgraduate level. In fact, in many countries in Europe —including Spain, there are no requirements for bilingual teachers to be trained in any content-based teaching approaches. This lack of training has been identified as a common issue of bilingual teachers across countries where a CLIL approach is implemented (e.g. Bárcena-Toyos, 2023; Pérez-Cañado, 2018).

The competencies of CLIL teachers are different from those required for mainstream teachers (Custodio-Espinar & García-Ramos, 2020; Morton & Nashaat-Sobhy, 2023), because they have to teach subject-specific content and EFL integrated, with attention to the academic language required for learners to reach the content learning objectives and demonstrate their knowledge and skills in the subject area. Since the linguistic demands of the content determine the type of language needed to achieve the learning objectives, the implications of language that learners are exposed to in the content classroom lay in the need to learn academic language —both general and specific to the subject area, what is known as language for and language of learning, respectively in CLIL (Coyle et al, 2010)— and to level up the lack of parity between learners’ cognitive and FL levels (Lo & Fung, 2020). The integration of content and language has, of course, implications for teachers, who have to adapt their pedagogies to accommodate the particular needs of this group of students, and who also need to deal with their own linguistic challenges and demands, being learners of the language of instruction themselves, too (Nikula et al., 2016). Despite the popularity and rapid growth of CLIL programs, there are not any specific pedagogical or methodological requirements for teachers who teach content and language integrated in these programs, so there are no specific CLIL pre-service training at higher education levels. So, this lack of pedagogical training to integrate content and language in their lessons prompts CLIL teachers to rely heavily on their own experience as language learners and their beliefs about language and language learning (Morton & Nashaat-Sobhy, 2023). Therefore, a key skill that CLIL teachers should acquire is language awareness, which implies not only being proficient in the FL but also being aware of the linguistic necessities that learners face, as well as using the appropriate learning pedagogies and theories to help their students in the learning process (Mortimore, 2023; Cammarata & Tedick, 2012). When teachers lack this skill because it has not been part of their pre- or in-service training, there is a tendency to teach only key vocabulary and overlook other important areas of academic language (Bárcena-Toyos, 2020).