Shuttling between language and content teaching: Exploring opportunities and challenges through collaborative autoethnography

Abstract

This study investigated the experiences and histories of two teachers of both language and content classes to undergraduate students in Japanese universities, one a British anglophone speaker and the other a Japanese national. In Japan, with the spread of English-medium instruction (EMI) courses, issues of language use have stimulated much debate. As teachers of both English and applied linguistics, through a collaborative autoethnographic (CAE) approach, we explored issues of shuttling between Japanese and English, and of content acquired in both languages. Our findings revealed the nature of our translanguaging practices and related them to our epistemic beliefs and study histories abroad, noting the influence of those experiences and differing student attitudes towards our relative status as English speakers. Conclusions pointed to the benefits of the research methodology of CAE to co-construct our narratives and unpack how our personal backgrounds intersected with our current EMI pedagogies. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

Keywords

• collaborative autoethnography
• content
• EMI
• translanguaging