Research on immersion teaching has consistently shown that immersion teachers tend to focus on subject matter content at the expense of language teaching. The response to that research has often entailed suggestions for teachers on how better to integrate language and content in their instruction. However, missing from the discussion are rich descriptions of the actual experiences that immersion teachers have as they attempt to balance language and content in their teaching. This phenomenological study aims to address this gap by exploring teachers’ lived experience with content and language integration. In this article, authors report on findings suggesting that immersion teachers’ experience with balancing language and content is a multifaceted struggle involving issues related to teacher identity, stakeholder expectations, and understandings regarding the relationship between language and content. Implications for school‐based support for immersion programs as well as calls for reform in immersion teacher preparation and professional development are shared.

Content-based instruction (CBI) has been touted as an effective curricular approach in a wide range of educational contexts, including immersion and English as a second language. Yet this approach to curriculum design is rarely implemented in conventional K -16 foreign language (FL) programs in the United States today. The phenomenological study described here attempted to gain a deeper understanding of factors affecting the implementation of CBI by exploring three traditional FL teachers' learning experiences during a year-long professional-development program designed to introduce the approach. Transitioning toward CBI, the findings suggest, can be a professionally intimidating experience, involving a struggle to re-examine one's own teaching identity and one's vision of what teaching and learning ought to be. Important implications emerging from this study include a need for professional-development programs to better scaffold teachers' learning experience and to create safer environments for teachers to explore pedagogical alternatives.

Research has shown content-based instruction (CBI) to be effective in various language settings, yet this promising curricular approach remains rarely implemented in mainstream foreign language educational contexts. While the existing body of research has identified important barriers to the implementation of CBI, it has neglected the problem of meaning, which is essential to understanding educational reforms. This phenomenological study explores the meaning that the experience of learning CBI had for in-service foreign language teachers in traditional teaching contexts who were once enrolled in a year-long professional development program specifically designed to help them become familiar with CBI core principles and to create CBI curricular materials. Findings suggest that teachers struggle mainly with the idea of teaching language through content, a concept that they have difficulty grasping or even accepting as a possibility. Professional development programs must be designed to respond to this specific challenge if they are to help teachers explore new instructional possibilities.

This literature review, which examines the research on integrating the teaching of content and language at the pre‐K–12 level, provides a synthesis of research conducted over the past 10 years in a wide array of educational contexts, ranging from content‐driven, high time‐intensive to language‐driven, low time‐intensive program models. Organized into three major thematic strands, this review examines research on student outcomes, on classroom interaction studies that emphasize teacher practice, and on stakeholder perspectives in contexts where approaches aiming at integrating content and language in instruction are being implemented. The review concludes with a discussion highlighting key issues that remain to be addressed and outlines directions for future research.

This case study enabled researchers to understand the knowledge embedded in a world language teacher's enactment of content‐based instruction (CBI) through the lens of a theoretical model inspired by Shulman's (1987) construct of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). The model, called integration pedagogical content knowledge (I–PCK), represents an adaptation of PCK that explicitly addresses the expanded set of content knowledge that is necessary for teachers to effectively implement CBI. Through descriptions of the participant's knowledge and experiences, the case study documents the I–PCK model in action, highlighting her strengths when integrating both academic content and world language learning and allowing specific areas that were in need of further development to be pinpointed. Findings suggest that the model can inform the work of language teacher education and professional development focused on CBI.