Abstract
In Taiwan, in teacher education programs, since 2019, the Ministry of Education has enacted a new teacher preparation program to prepare bilingual teachers, teaching content subjects in English. With the international trend in bilingual education, Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) has been practiced in many schools. Following the policy of bilingual education from Ministry of Education, this project stepped into preparing CLIL teachers. Pre-service teachers, taking the researcher’s course, English Reading and Writing Instruction, were invited to participate in this project. The course is a three-credit, elective course for preservice English teachers. The first 9 weeks in this course were designed for theory instruction as well as practicing teaching mini-reading activities. Two weeks were arranged for assessments in reading theories and microteaching. One week was for lesson plan revision. Three weeks of field-teaching was arranged for the participants to practice CLIL lessons in an elementary school near the researcher’s university. Following Gall & Acheson’s (2011) clinical supervision model, the researcher guided the participants to design CLIL lessons, including activities and materials, in the subject of Social Studies, intended for teaching fourth graders. Classroom observations and peer discussions were arranged. Two units in the elementary school textbook were selected. They were about Taiwan local cultures, folktales, cuisines, historic sites, scenic sites, museums, etc. Participants practiced teaching in the elementary classrooms during November and December. A mixed-method approach was employed. Data included examining the participants’ reflective journal writing and observation notes as well as semi-structured interviews, inquiring about participants’ perspectives after participating in this CLIL project, including lesson planning, activities design, teaching practice, and peer observation. A pre-and post-survey was administered to examine participants’ CLIL teaching competence. Descriptive statistics showed the mean differences among participants. Constant comparative method was used for qualitative data analysis. Categories emerged from the data were then grouped into themes for discussion. The findings show that participants indicated they learned to teach with CLIL during the field teaching and sensed the impacts of supervision on their pedagogical knowledge development. The results of this study hope to provide insights for supervising elementary preservice English teachers in CLIL, providing CLIL lessons and activities in social studies for teachers and students, and enhancing elementary English teacher education in Taiwan.