Searching for identity and focus: towards an analytical framework for language teachers in bilingual education.

In CLIL contexts, school subjects are taught in an additional language,allowing learners to acquire the target language through meaningfuluse. This places language teachers in an ambiguous position. What istheir role in this context? On the one hand, language teachers areexpected to collaborate with subject teacher colleagues; on the otherhand, they teach separate language lessons. This double role provideslanguage teachers and their educators with specific challenges in termsof identity and focus.To explore and explain the choices language teachers have, this reviewexamines international research from the last 25 years with a primary focuson secondary schools. As recent discussions argue convincingly thatresearch into CLIL, Content Based Instruction and immersion benefitfrom convergence and cross-fertilisation, we used a broad range ofsearch terms to identify primary and secondary research.Selected articles were organised into four inquiry areas and analysedthematically: (1) language focus, (2) content focus of learning, (3)language teachers’ pedagogical practices, and (4) their collaborationwith subject teachers. Based on these themes, we developed aframework for language teachers and their educators in bilingualeducation designed to help them explore, explain and develop theirown identity and focus.