＂English-only or Nothing＂: Practitioners' Perspective on the Policy and Implementation of CLIL in Higher Education

With the inception of internationalism, Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) has been adopted in many classroom settings in higher education to enhance students' global competitiveness after graduation. However, research on CLIL has been primarily focused on learners, leaving teachers' reflection unexplored in the Asia-Pacific region. This inquiry thus attempts to bridge this gap by exploring practitioners' experience of teaching CLIL that underpins their critical praxis in Taiwan where CLIL has been adopted and promoted by the government in higher education. Qualitative data were collected and analyzed based on nine practitioners of such various disciplines as humanities, social sciences, engineering and commerce from nine different universities in northern, central and southern Taiwan where CLIL has prevailed. Through a phenomenology framework, several recurrent themes emerge from the data such as the unequivocal English elitism, limited creativity and spontaneity, lacking teacher preparation, and biased recruitment. The results also suggest that although these practitioners are optimistic about the implementation of CLIL as revealed in the extant literature, the practice of CLIL promoted by the government has resulted in several such potential issues as inequality and stress for them. Pedagogical implications are further discussed.