Leveraging Relational Agency: CLIL Teacher Collaboration in One Kazakhstani University

Although numerous studies about the experiences of teachers in English-medium instruction (EMI) and Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) include calls for greater collaboration between content subject teachers and their English (or second language) teacher counterparts, few describe actual collaborative relationships. In this Kazakhstan-based qualitative study, we applied a teacher agency framework to answer three questions: (a) What challenges do university teachers face when delivering an EMI curriculum?; (b) What collaborative practices do teachers experience?; and (c) How do teachers use collaboration to negotiate the challenges they face? Through observations, participant journals, semi-structured interviews and document analysis, we discovered that teachers found their students’ low levels of engagement and English proficiency, their institution's critical observation culture and the ever-changing national and institutional policy landscape to be challenging. By co-authoring research, exchanging advice and co-teaching, the teachers responded agentively to institutional and ideological structures, thus demonstrating how relational agency can have a resourcing effect on teachers’ experiences. These findings shed light on the ongoing discussion of teacher agency and yield important implications for teachers, teacher education programmes and researchers.