Developing pre-service teachers’ instruction-giving practices through an explicit training intervention: Evidence from primary CLIL classrooms

Instruction-giving (IG) is central to classroom interaction in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), yet it is rarely taught explicitly in pre-service CLIL teacher education. In response, the authors redesigned a CLIL practicum course and introduced targeted IG training in the second year. This study (a) described the redesign of an IG-focused training component and (b) examined whether the redesigned course was associated with differences in student teachers’ IG practices across cohorts. Fifty-two pre-service teachers in an eight-semester Primary English Language Teaching program (PELT) in Germany implemented CLIL-based projects with 180 pupils (ages 9–10) across two consecutive cohorts (2024, n = 25; 2025, n = 27). The study compared a baseline course implementation (2024) with a redesigned implementation that included explicit IG training (2025) informed by previous research. Audio-recorded classroom discourse from a randomly selected subsample of STs (n = 20; 10 per cohort) was segmented into CLIL-related IG episodes and analyzed using eight IG principles rated on a four-point scale. Quantitative comparisons were complemented by qualitative classroom discourse analysis and field notes. Mean overall IG scores were higher in 2025 (M = 3.16) than in 2024 (M = 2.79). The largest differences concerned clarity, responding to non-understanding, and strategic L1 use. Differences were smaller for sequencing and multimodality, and modeling did not differ across cohorts in this dataset. The findings suggest that explicit IG training is a teachable component of pre-service teachers’ instructional repertoire. While the cross-cohort design does not support causal claims, consistent descriptive and qualitative differences suggest that explicit IG training holds pedagogical promise for CLIL teacher education. • Instruction-giving (IG) is a teachable component of student teachers' (STs ) instructional repertoire. • Explicit IG training improved STs' clarity, sequencing, multimodality, and strategic L1 use in CLIL classrooms. • Cohort comparison revealed medium-to-large practical gains for the explicitly trained group. • High-quality IG was characterized by micro-sequencing, modeling, and multimodal scaffolding. • Findings underscore the value of embedding explicit IG practice in pre-service CLIL teacher education.