Etapas del proceso administrativo

As described in section 4.3.2, the CoRe instrument was developed for exploring PCK in science teaching, and, as such, it does not have an explicit language element. To be operationalized for CLIL, a language awareness component needs to be added. The first column in table 4.2 contains the original CoRe tool developed by Loughran, Mulhall and Berry (2004: 376). It captures essential aspects of PCK, maintaining the flavour of Shulman’s original definition, by asking the teacher to articulate the ‘big ideas’ that she wants to focus on, relating them to learner characteristics, and the pedagogical strategies the teacher intends to use. The second column has been added for the purposes of this study. It ‘mirrors’ the content issues identified in the original CoRe by asking teachers to consider language dimensions of these issues. The way these questions are worded, and the way they mirror the content issues are designed to allow teachers to construct language awareness-related PCK, or TLA-CLIL in a way which is very close to the spirit of Shulman’s concept of PCK. It is a way of seeing the topic through ‘language eyes’, and it relates the language dimension of the topic with learner characteristics and instructional strategies.

In both columns, the instrument avoids using terms that may cause difficulties for researchers and teachers in establishing mutual understanding, a problem that is common in teacher cognition research and which will receive detailed treatment in chapter five. Even so, it is quite a demanding instrument to use, as it focuses on issues that may be tacit knowledge for teachers, and which they may have never had to articulate before, especially the language dimension for content teachers. For this reason, in the study it is used as an interview tool after teachers have had an opportunity to either consider the questions or actually fill it in. By using it in the interactive context of an interview it is possible to probe and clarify ideas, thus allowing teachers to

instrument with groups of teachers, in investigating CLIL contexts this is more difficult, as groups of CLIL teachers will usually be teaching different subjects. In this study, it is used with individual CLIL teachers as a way of allowing them to construct aspects of

IMPORTANT CONTENT IDEAS/ CONCEPTS TLA COMPONENT

1. What you intend the students to learn about this topic.

Big idea 1, 2, 3 …

1. What language you intend the students to learn/use in order to talk/write about this topic.

Big language point 1, 2, 3 …

2. Why it is important for students to know this.

2. Why it is important for students to learn/use this particular language. 3. What else you know about this

topic (that you do not intend students to know yet).

3. What other language related to this topic that might be important for the future but can be introduced later.

4. Difficulties/limitations connected with teaching this topic.

4. Language

difficulties/limitations students are likely to have connected with this topic.

5. Knowledge about students’ thinking which influences your teaching of this topic.

5. Knowledge of how students use language which influences your teaching of this topic. 6. Other factors that influence

your teaching of this topic.

6. Other factors related to the fact that the teaching is in a L2 which influence your teaching in this topic.

7. Teaching procedures (and particular reasons for using these to engage with this topic).

7. How you might adapt (if necessary) teaching prodecures to take into account the fact that students are studying this topic in L2. Are there any language- teaching procedures which could be used?

8. Specific ways of ascertaining students’ understanding or confusion around this area (include likely range of responses).

8. How you might use language/interaction in ascertaining students’ understanding or confusion in this topic.

Table 4.2 CoRe for CLIL incorporating KAL component (adapted from Loughran, Mulhall and Berry 2004: 376)

their teacher pedagogical constructions (TPCs - Hashweh 2005) for the units they chose to be observed for the study.

The CoRe is a useful tool for expanding on Hashweh’s idea that PCK in the form of TPCs is particularly related to planning. Planning is crucial to PCK, with Shulman claiming that

planning - whether explicitly or implicitly - the performance of teaching (...) is as much a part of teaching as is the actual performance itself. (Shulman 1987: 16-17).

However, in spite of its theoretical importance, Hasweh points out that PCK research has tended to neglect planning, and that the time is right for a renewed interest in this aspect of teachers’ practices. The CoRe instrument allows access to the ‘pedagogical reasoning’ involved in planning by giving the teachers the opportunity to first reflect and then talk about their ideas for the unit at the preactive stage of teaching. However, it is important to be clear that the CoRe does not investigate planning itself as an activity. As Suchman (2007) has pointed out, planning needs to be understood as a situated activity, and not a causal factor which explains events as they unfold. Using the CoRe at the preactive stage of teaching gives the teachers the opportunity to talk about their plans for the unit, producing representations of, for example, aspects of the topic, activities they will use, and learner characteristics in relation to the topic. It does not allow us to look over their shoulders as they engage in the activity of planning. In fact, in discussing the issues raised in the CoRe, teachers may claim that they do not in fact do much detailed planning.

The CoRe instrument thus allows the teachers to produce rich descriptions of their conceptualizations of the topic in relation to a wide range of aspects of their practices. Teachers can ‘script’ their descriptions as what they generally do when teaching the topic or they can provide story-based one-off accounts of things that happened teaching the topic on another occasion. In Elbaz’s (1981) terms, they can produce rules of practice, general principles and images. However, all of this happens at some remove from the classroom. In a sense, teachers are imagining the teaching of the topic. The picture of their pedagogical construction for the topic needs to be completed by observing what they do in the classroom. The CoRe is the starting point in building a picture of how CLIL teachers construct and use their TLA-CLIL. As we move into the interactive phase of teaching the topic we continue to build this picture by using and adapting Hashweh’s conceptual framework. The aim is to build a representation of the CLIL teachers’ TLA as it is manifested in their verbal commentaries before and after teaching, and during classroom interaction. Throughout, the focus is on how the

and the production of verbal commentaries in interaction with the researcher. It is also important to point out that the focus of the study is not on individual teachers and their characteristics. This is in line with Loughran, Mulhall and Berry’s view that PCK is not to be seen ‘solely as something residing in an individual teacher’ (2004: 374). In their work, PCK is thus not just something belonging to individuals, but is shared knowledge distributed across teachers at a collective level. Of course, there is individual diversity and even idiosyncrasy in teaching practices, but the study aims to examine the

phenomenon of TLA-CLIL as a collective entity, as something distributed across different individuals, in the ways in which their practices are organized and (re) constructed in verbal commentaries.

In using the CoRe to allow the teachers to articulate their TLA as an aspect of their PCK, it is important to bear in mind that what they will produce will indeed be constructions, that is, discursive representations of reality (Potter 1996). This shift to seeing PCK as constructions is also in line with current thinking, as can be seen in this statement from Hashweh, in which he highlights the constructed nature of PCK in the shape of teachers’ plans:

The resulting plan, whether mental or written, is a construction, not as tangible as the end-product of an architectural design process, but a construction none the less. Lately, many educators have accepted constructivism as an orientation, and have described learning as a constructivist process. If anything among all

teacher knowledge categories is truly constructed, it is definitely the PCK category. (Hashweh 2005: 278. Italics added.)

Hashweh here is using ‘constructed’ more in constructivist than in constructionist terms. That is, his approach is essentially cognitivist in that the teachers’ constructions are taken to exist as some kind of mental representations, rather than as constructed in discourse. This thesis takes the ‘constructed’ nature of PCK further by adopting a social practice and constructionist perspective, in which PCK is examined as teachers’

discursive representations of aspects of their worlds of practice. Thus, the CoRe is seen, not as an instrument for accessing a hidden mental realm of knowledge and belief, but as means for getting teachers to construct versions of their reality, as it relates to the

role(s) of language in teaching a specific unit, and by extension, to their practices generally.

4.5 Chapter summary and conclusion

This chapter has set out a framework for the examination of the central phenomenon under investigation in the study, CLIL teachers’ language awareness (TLA-CLIL). The chapter began with a review of research on characteristics of CLIL teachers and

teachers who use related approaches to combining content and language. This provided a backround for a characterization of the broad population of teachers who taught in the Bilingual Project which is the setting for the study. It was argued that research on what CLIL and other teachers who teach language and content together think, believe and do, lacked a coherent framework. To fill this gap, Borg’s (2006) framework for the study of teacher cognition in language education was introduced. The importance of using consistent terminology and concepts was highlighted, and the chapter identified and defined the key constructs of teacher knowledge, practical knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge and teacher language awareness. The tripersectival

conceptualization of language introduced in chapter three was combined with four modes of knowing to provide an analytic frame for constructing a dialogue between the ideas in the literature and the evidence produced in the study’s findings.

The chapter then focused more closely on the construct of teacher language awareness (TLA), drawing out the similarities and differences between Andrews’ (2007) work on TLA for language teachers and the TLA required for CLIL teaching. In line with Andrews’ model, TLA for CLIL was characterized as a component of CLIL teachers’ PCK, but with added complexity due to the integration of content and language. An instrument for eliciting aspects of CLIL teachers’ TLA as an aspect of their PCK, based on Loughran et al.’s (2004) Content Representation (CoRe) was introduced. The chapter then shifted the focus to how recent work on PCK was moving from a more individualist perspective to seeing it as a socially shared and constructed phenomenon. Taking such an approach has clear methodological implications, relating to what kinds of research questions (if any) can be asked, what kinds of data can be used, how they

are analysed, and what sorts of claims can be made. All of these topics are dealt with in the next chapter, which describes the methodological approach and design of the study.

Chapter 5. Methodology