Teachers’ Professional Competence for Bilingual (Economic) Education

Abstract

Bilingual education holds great potential to simultaneously nurture bilingualism, biliteracy as well as subject-specific and intercultural competences – all crucial skills for the 21st century. However, the widespread implementation of bilingual education faces challenges such as the lack of learning materials and considerable training needs of active bilingual education teachers. Although teachers’ challenges and pedagogical practices within different content-based bilingual education types like immersion, dual-language education or content and language integrated learning are similar, an overarching and comprehensive overview of bilingual education teachers’ required competences is still missing. To address this research gap and ultimately increase the quality of teacher training, the present dissertation closely examines the required competences of bilingual education teachers for secondary education both in general and in the context of the promising bilingual subject of economics. This investigation incorporates a systematic literature review, a mixed-methods study to accumulate practitioners’ insights into professionalism and a linguistic analysis of learning materials. The systematic review encompassed 79 international reports on bilingual education teachers’ competences, which were categorically grouped and narratively synthesised. A competence model specific to bilingual education teachers was developed based on the converging competences found in the competence frameworks and the reports on individual competences. Important competences included several aspects of language proficiency such as subject-specific or academic language proficiency and additional requirements like critical consciousness, cooperation skills, pedagogical/psychological knowledge of methodology or material design and pedagogical content knowledge. The second study used a mixed-methods design with 32 participants (trainee teachers and teacher educators involved in a bilingual education qualification program) filling in a questionnaire and 11 follow-up interviews with participants teaching political studies or geography bilingually. It compared beliefs about generalist and bilingual education teachers’ professional competences and revealed that bilingual education teachers’ competence requirements were more pronounced. These included expanded language proficiency, international content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge of merging language, content, learning and culture. Higher motivation and enhanced pedagogical/psychological knowledge of material design, methodology and assessment were also deemed important by practitioners. Notable differences between trainee teachers and teacher educators emerged particularly regarding the importance of reflection and the required level of language proficiency. In the third study, the linguistic complexity of 1529 English main body texts in 30 bilingual economics learning materials was analysed. The results showed a lack of systematic complexity progression across grade levels that can potentially hinder students’ continuous language development. Together with substantial fluctuations in lexical richness and the overall scarcity of ready-made materials, these results highlighted the need for bilingual education teachers to create or adapt their own learning materials. To this effect, language proficiency, pedagogical/psychological knowledge of material design and learning processes, (pedagogical) content knowledge and intrinsic motivation were identified as essential for high-quality material production. The present dissertation furthermore discusses and triangulates the results of the three studies to come up with a competence model specifically targeted at bilingual economic education teachers. Overall, it sheds light on teachers’ competences, challenges and opportunities in the field of bilingual (economic) education. Therefore, this comprehensive dissertation contributes to the enhancement of teacher training for bilingual (economic) education. Additionally, the two competence models developed in this dissertation can be used as reflective tools by interested generalist (economic) education teachers. Finally, this dissertation creates a solid foundation for future research, which overall benefits policy, schools, teachers, students and researchers alike.