Using EMI in a Geography Junior High Classroom With the Use of MEC in CLIL Approach

Bilingual education means acquiring two languages in education (Baker, 2001). In Taiwan, Chinese is regarded as the official language, and English is regarded as one of the foreign languages, with various local languages such as Hokkien and Hakka. However, this situation will be changed as Taiwan will be a bilingual country by the Year 2030, as suggested by the National Development Council (NDC, 2018) that all primary and secondary schools be bilingual by 2030 with integrating content learning with English for non-language teachers (content subject teachers). While there are studies reporting the teaching and learning effectiveness of learning science in elementary schools (Beaudin, 2022; Huang, 2020), the counterparts of junior high schools were scarcely reported. Moreover, the linguistic demands of humanities subjects are higher than that of science, complicating the level of difficulty of research which precisely is the reason for the research to increase teaching and learning effectiveness of learning humanities in English.

In this action research, students received English as the Medium of Instruction (EMI) in Geography lessons to increase their exposure in English. The teacher-researcher integrated CLIL approaches including code-switching (Grosjean, 1982, p. 145), translanguaging (Garcia and Lin, 2017; Li, 2018), literate talk (Luk and Lin, 2015) with multimodalities and entextualisation cycle (MEC) (Lin, 2016) employed to facilitate meaning-making processes between the teacher-researcher and students. Results show that students had steady improvements after each parallel tasks. Implications will be shed in this study.