Development of teaching materials for writing through teacher-researcher collaboration across language subjects

Purpose This paper proposes a cross-curricular and multilingual approach to writing as an innovative teaching practice. The approach is multilingual because it draws on different languages and cross-curricular because it involves collaboration between teachers of different language subjects. The study examines the development process of teaching materials to facilitate that teaching approach.Design Teaching materials were developed through a teacher–researcher collaboration, facilitated by the Discourses of Writing as a shared language for discussing conceptualisations of writing. Four in-service language teachers participated in the project in secondary schools in Berlin, Germany: Hanna (German), Wendy (English), Amy (French), and Fabiola (Spanish). Data consisted primarily of interviews on teaching approaches to writing and ethnographic observations of language classes, collaboration processes, and teaching material design and implementation.Findings The teaching materials foregrounded writing as a purposeful and communicative social practice in each language subject. Their cross-curricular design enabled teachers to identify shared purposes of writing and shared practices across language subjects, such as similar writing processes. As such, their cross-curricular nature demonstrated that collaboration does not require teachers to speak additional languages, offering a feasible alternative to multilingual teaching. The study also shows how assessment shapes writing tasks and limits opportunities for communicative writing.Value The study provides an empirically grounded example of how cross-curricular collaboration can promote shared understandings of writing across language subjects. It argues for the intergation of explicit classroom discussions of writing as a tool for learning into language classes, particularly given AI’s growing influence on writing practices.