Language and Content Knowledge

Next year, I'm going to teach a course on helping EMI content subject teachers to teach their disciplines in English. It's a challenge as this is my first time to teach non-English subject teachers! I know my job is to teach them how to link the two interrelated notions - language and content knowledge together. Oftentimes, many EMI content subject teachers have encountered a problem - students' low English proficiency. Our job, as teacher educators, aims to coach these EMI teachers how to plan the curriculum and how to inject some English-related pedagogies into their daily teaching practice. For humanity subjects such as history, geography and liberal studies, the nature of these subjects is easier to use English as MOI because students have to read and write English a lot. But for mathematics, it will be quite demanding as some mathematics teachers will say that their students have very minimal opportunity to produce written discourse in the subject. The importance of teaching students English in this specific subject discipline seems to be of low priority. What students have to master is skills and conceptual thinking rather than language abilities. But they forgot most science students have problems in comprehending the questions even though they know how to do the sums. In this case, planning how to teach reading in mathematics would be a way out!

There is so much to learn in the next 6 months.