“You don’t say ‘tempo, allegro’”: coteaching and shaping learner language in CLIL classroom interaction

Originally proposed for inclusive education, coteaching has gradually broadened to other areas, including Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL). Prior research indicates that CLIL content teachers employ diverse multimodal strategies to secure students’ conceptual understanding; yet, they seldom shape learner language, e.g. by fostering more elaborated and extended student output. This qualitative and interpretive study examines how coteaching may favour the emergence of co-teachers’ interactional practices oriented to integrated learning and shaping learner language in classroom interaction. The data come from a secondary school in Barcelona, Spain, where a Music teacher and an EFL teacher coteach a grade 9 class. A conversation analysis approach reveals that coteaching was accomplished through the co-teachers’ multimodal and interactional dynamics, role alternation, and convergence of pedagogical goals, resulting in enhanced interactional learning environments. Yet, despite the Music teacher’s multimodal actions, these were not oriented to shaping learner language. The EFL teacher, on the contrary, enabled students to produce more sophisticated utterances in English. Thus, the analysis portrays what CLIL complementary teaching might look like and highlights the role of the EFL specialist. We argue that coteaching in CLIL can be deeply transformative and empowering and outline implications for CLIL teaching and teacher education.