Scaffolding English scientific materials through genre analysis in the CLIL context

Previous studies have recommended employing genre analysis as a supportive framework for English scientific content in the content and language integrated learning (CLIL) context. However, little is known about how CLIL teachers collaborate to co-create genre-based scaffolds and how they perceive the benefits and challenges of genre analysis for material development through interdisciplinary teacher collaborations. This study aims to fill these gaps by exploring how two physics teachers and two English teachers paired to co-create scaffolds to improve students’ comprehension of English scientific materials. This study also investigates the teachers’ perceptions of their genre-based scaffolding design experiences via interdisciplinary teacher collaborations. This study is a qualitative case study, collecting data from scaffolds in English scientific materials, reflective reports, and interviews. The findings show that the teachers developed explicit tutorials, color-marking, and comprehension questions to develop students’ genre knowledge, linguistic awareness, and content understanding. This study also reveals that the teachers gained insights into analysing English scientific texts through input processing techniques, thus developing their genre literacy and pedagogical knowledge through interdisciplinary teacher collaborations. This study contributes to the literature on genre-based pedagogy in the CLIL context by highlighting the use of input processing scaffolds to develop learners’ linguistic awareness about textual genres in English scientific materials.