‘My English seems not enough’: moving from language deficit views to Kazakhstani CLIL (content and language integrated learning) teachers’ funds of knowledge
Bedeker M. Kerimkulova S.
2025Routledge
Pedagogy, Culture and Society
2025#33Issue 41475 - 1493 pp.
Our paper critiques the native speaker fallacy underpinning state-mandated policies requiring teachers who speak languages other than English to use it as the medium of instruction. Using a centre-based Funds of Knowledge (FoK) lens, we examine how Kazakhstani biology teachers navigate Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) through English Medium Instruction (EMI). A qualitative analysis of teacher reflections, observations, narratives, and focus groups revealed their hybrid epistemic stance discernible in their shift between knowledge transmission and knowledge construction and their flexible linguistic stance when leveraging their students’ Russian and Kazakh linguistic repertoires to contribute to science understanding and learning in EMI. In highlighting CLIL as a travelling policy, our results revealed the complexities of integrating Western educational models into a post-Soviet system, challenging the theory-practice divide, because a centre-based FoK lens redirected our focus from Western standards to the recognition of teachers’ professional identities and EMI pedagogies as both contextually relevant and locally grounded. Hence, our results call for more inclusive and social justice theoretical lenses to bridge and engage with the pedagogical nexus when different linguistic, cultural and epistemological ways of being merge.
content and language integrated learning (CLIL) , Funds of knowledge (FoK) , hybridity , pedagogical nexus
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Department of Education, New Uzbekistan University, Tashkent, Uzbekistan
Graduate School of Education, Nazarbayev University, Astana, Kazakhstan
Department of Education
Graduate School of Education
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