Affordances of the English Language Subject in Systematizing Cross-Curricular Teaching Practices

Abstract

For most students in Europe, English is the first formally learned foreign language, allowing them to draw on their existing English knowledge when learning additional languages. Simultaneously, English can exert a dominant influence that overshadows other languages. Cross-curricular teaching practices may offer relief to this tension between English as a facilitative resource and a potentially inhibiting force in language learning: when teachers draw on knowledge about language or teaching content students acquired in other language subjects, they foster the learning of the target language by leveraging students’ prior knowledge and not prioritizing one language over another. In this nexus analysis, I analyse ethnographic observations of teaching practices through a thematic analysis. More specifically, I analyse three cross-curricular actions (unique acts in a specific point in time and place) that teachers of different languages took to teach writing in their language classrooms. Understanding how those cross-curricular actions emerged may shed light on how to systematise them, i.e., turn them into social practices (a recognisable way of acting in society). Each action represents a different affordance of the English subject in systematising cross-curricular teaching practices: a German and English teacher showed how the teaching content of the English subject can be coordinated with a German class, a French teacher showed how a lack of cross-curricular coordination may lead to confusion among students, and a German teacher showed how to build on the English subject in a German class by using multilingual teaching materials even if she as the teacher lacks proficiency in other languages, including English. This paper proposes cross-curricular teaching practices as an alternative to multilingual teaching practices.