Abstract
Accompanied the desire for more students studying Chinese in the K-12 classrooms around the world is a need for Chinese as a Foreign Language teachers who are developed to embrace a language pedagogy targeting integration of language and culture or content. In the U.S., The Five Cs (Communication, Culture, Comparison, Connection, Community) proposed by ACTFL through the National Standards Collaborative Board (2015) specifically require attention to the integration of content, culture, and language. In Europe, the CLIL (Content Language Integrated Learning) approach (Llinares & Pena, 2015) to foreign language education also reflects the inclusive ideal of integrating language and content in foreign language instruction. However, the reality in the U.S. is that the urgent need for more Chinese teachers has resulted in the hiring of many Chinese speakers in the K-12 classrooms without systematic training in the pedagogy for integration. Addressing the multiple goals in a systematic and integrated way presents a challenge for Chinese classroom teachers. In the field of research, studies focusing on Chinese teachers’ professional development are very limited. At the level of instructional design and practice, a question is how a professional development program can help Chinse teachers move from skill-focused language teaching toward systematic integration. This paper presents a case study to focus on a public school in-service Chinese teacher studying in a language education program utilizing a functional linguistic perspective (Halliday, 1994) to approach language curriculum and instruction. The study is both self-exploratory and an action research that has taken the shape in actions. It specifically examines the participants’ struggles in the process of using Mohan’s Knowledge Framework (2001) to organize instructional units that integrate the five Cs and the achievement in their joint effort to create and implement an instructional unit in a middle school exploratory Chinese program. Data were collected during a regular school year in the forms of curriculum design, teacher’s self-reflection, oral and e-mail correspondences between the researcher and the teacher, videotaped lessons, and students’ learning products in both oral and written formats. Output from the students are analyzed from a systemic functional perspective to capture the ideational meaning (Halliday, 1994) realized via limited linguistic resources available to students at the time. The findings of the study provide implications for both language teacher development and classroom actions.
Presenters
Jingzi HuangAssociate Dean and School Director of Teacher Education, College of Education and Behavioral Sciences, University of Northern Colorado, Colorado, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Teaching Teacher Education
