‘My English seems not enough’: moving from language deficit views to Kazakhstani CLIL (content and language integrated learning) teachers’ funds of knowledge

What is it about?

Our paper critiques the native speaker fallacy underpinning state-mandated policies requiring teachers who speak languages other than English to use it as the medium of instruction. Using a centre-based Funds of Knowledge (FoK) lens, we examine how Kazakhstani biology teachers navigate Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) through English Medium Instruction (EMI). A qualitative analysis of teacher reflections, observations, narratives, and focus groups revealed their hybrid epistemic stance discernible in their shift between knowledge transmission and knowledge construction and their flexible linguistic stance when leveraging their students’ Russian and Kazakh linguistic repertoires to contribute to science understanding and learning in EMI. In highlighting CLIL as a travelling policy, our results revealed the complexities of integrating Western educational models into a post-Soviet system, challenging the theory-practice divide, because a centre-based FoK lens redirected our focus from Western standards to the recognition of teachers’ professional identities and EMI pedagogies as both contextually relevant and locally grounded.

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Why is it important?

The results of the research call for more inclusive and social justice theoretical lenses to bridge and engage with the pedagogical nexus when different linguistic, cultural, and epistemological ways of being merge.