‘We're at the very beginning’: international teacher educator perspectives on content teacher preparation for bi- and multilingual disciplinary literacies

The expansion of bi- and multilingual education has resulted in content teachers needing to support disciplinary learning through an additional language. Research highlights both the need to prepare these teachers, and the scarcity of this preparation in initial teacher education. Given this backdrop, this international study harnesses the bi- and multilingual disciplinary literacies (BMDLs) framework to explore the potential preparation of pre-service content teachers (PCTs) for bi- and multilingual content classrooms through subject-specific teacher education. Approached from the perspective of building on good practice, we interviewed 14 content-specialist teacher educators (TEds), who are not explicitly tasked with preparing PCTs for bi- and multilingual education, but whose PCTs may go on to do so. Interviews and qualitative analysis focused on how TEds (i) conceptualise disciplinary language and literacies in their subject, and (ii) already implicitly prepare PCTs to support disciplinary language and learning in bi- and multilingual classrooms. Findings revealed a rich awareness of the link between disciplinary language and thinking, and of learners’ multilingualism while bi- and multilingual learning needs were outside their subject curricula. This study introduces the construct of Teacher Educator Language Awareness (TEdLA), underscoring the need and potential to systematically integrate BMDL-informed, language-sensitive approaches in teacher education.