Language teacher development in the English-in-the-discipline courses : bridging academic literacy, disciplinarity, and interdisciplinarity

Abstract

Cross-disciplinary collaborations among heterogeneous communities surge over the recent years, engaging disciplines to integrate different arenas of knowledge and thus requiring specialized academic literacies. To prepare students with literacies for the communication beyond disciplinary boundaries, language teachers increasingly induct disciplinary literacies into their linguistic instruction. The past decade has seen an inventory of interdisciplinary studies investigating students’ learning efficacy or classroom practices. However, little research attention has been paid to language teachers’ perspectives and their professional development in interdisciplinary teaching contexts. The role of subject knowledge and the development of discipline-specific language materials also remain under-investigated. To address these research gaps, this study examined how language teachers’ professional development was practiced in the English-in-the-discipline (ED) courses offered in an English-medium university in Hong Kong. A qualitative multiple case study approach was employed to explore the trajectories of three language teachers who taught an adjunct ED course to final-year engineering students. Two teachers, who came from non-engineering backgrounds, taught their own ED course for the first time as the data collection started. The other one was a former engineer and had years of ED teaching experiences; he also acted as a coordinator supervising the ED teaching team and liaising with specialists in the Faculty of Engineering. The collection of qualitative data spanned two semesters, consisting of interviews with teachers, teachers’ reflection notes, classroom observation field-notes, interviews with students, and artifacts such as course materials, students’ progress reports and their in-class notes. I adopted in vivo coding and second coding to analyze the interview transcripts and then purposive reading to cross-check the emergent themes in resonance with other collected data. This study conceptualizes three teachers’ professional growth by looking into the constructs of teacher learning and teacher expertise with reference to Clark and Hollingsworth’s (2002) Interconnected Model of Teacher Professional Growth (IMTPG) that featured teachers’ growth among four domains – Personal Domain, External Domain, Domain of Practice and Domain of Consequence. This study firstly affirmed the centrality of discipline-specific subject knowledge in ED teaching. Regardless of teaching experiences, three teachers’ learning of subject knowledge was discursively substantiated through different mediations: students’ assignments, on-the-job and off-the-job professional activities, and responsive dialogues with students and colleagues. ED teachers should also embrace situated knowledge, thus allowing them to boost their appreciative capacities to acclimate themselves to their context of work and transcend the disciplinary values of language teaching and engineering. Underscored by teachers’ disciplinary learning and situated knowledge, this study concluded that industrial involvement was not necessarily needed to facilitate interdisciplinary teaching as previous studies concluded. To craft students’ disciplinary literacies and socio-pragmatic competences, ED teachers should stress students’ declarative, procedural and political knowledge to justify their engineering choices. In light of the IMTPG, an extra Domain of Disciplinary Knowledge and five patterns of enactments and reflections among the four existing patterns were proposed to address the factors pertinent to the professional development of ED teachers. This study also adds to the literature on the content-language nexus and the development of discipline-specific and context-embedded learning materials.