Result: Teacher language awareness in CLIL teacher education in Argentina, Colombia, and Ecuador: a multiple case study

This multiple case study-based investigation examined teacher language awareness (TLA) for content and language integrated learning (CLIL). This study was carried out in three teacher education programmes in Argentina, Colombia, and Ecuador during two consecutive academic years (2019-2020, 2020-2021), and it sought to explore teacher educators’ (n = 5) and student-teachers’ (n = 58) understanding and practice of (teacher) language awareness for CLIL settings. Data were collected through interviews, online forums, teaching resources (e.g., slides, lesson plans, assignments) and classroom observations (online and face-to-face), and analysed following an interpretivist and inductive approach. Findings show that the participants approached TLA as explicit knowledge about language, and associated it to notions of basic interpersonal skills, general academic language, and subject-specific terminology when TLA was embedded in CLIL. Based on Morton’s (2018) construct of language knowledge for content learning, the paper puts forward a data-driven model of teacher language awareness for CLIL teacher education.