Curators and Mediators of Language, Content, Pedagogy, and Technology: Teachers’ Expanding Roles in Fully-Online CLIL Contexts

Abstract As world events have morphed teachers’ roles within English medium of instruction (EMI) contexts to incorporate more online teaching practices, teachers’ integration of digital tools has faced technological and curricular challenges. While previous research has examined the integration of digital tools in face-to-face and hybrid EMI settings (e. g., Finardi, 2015; O’Dowd, 2018), more research is needed to understand the familiarization process teachers engage in as they implement fully-online teaching to support their content and language integrated learning (CLIL) teaching. As part of a larger project, this case study sets out to fill this gap by examining the practices and perspectives of 30 Kazakhstani university teachers who adopted CLIL approaches while needing to adapt to fully-online teaching contexts. Using the concept of technological pedagogical content knowledge (Mishra & Koehler, 2006) in tandem with Ball et al.’s (2016) seven CLIL principles as a framework, this study thematically analyzed workshop artifacts, survey responses, semi-structured interview transcripts, and videos from online class lessons to find that teachers were mediators and curators of content, language, pedagogy, and digital tools. The findings offer pedagogical insights for the implementation of professional development (PD) to prepare teachers to meaningfully curate and mediate technology into their CLIL pedagogy to teach content within EMI contexts.