Interculturality in the Science Classroom Within the Context of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL): Practices from Indonesian Primary Schools

Abstract

Interculturality in science classroom with CLIL context is crucial for establishing intercultural awareness and supporting students in developing relevant abilities to deal with intercultural interactions. Different techniques can be implemented for introducing cultural values within teaching and learning process as well as instructional materials. This is a virtual ethnography of three grade one female science teachers in Islamic primary schools of Indonesia to investigate intercultural practices from the teaching and learning activities and their congruency with the instructional materials. By in-depth interviews, virtual observations, as well as text-book analysis, the data of this study were obtained and then codified to get the emerging themes to discuss. Thematic analysis was employed and members checking was carried out for trustworthiness. Findings revealed that all participants of the study agreed the intercultural practices in their science class. They systematically planned their teaching with intercultural integration but they did not implicitly provide particular section in the Lesson Plan. In fact, they confirmed that they selected texts or resources which possibly strengthen the students' intercultural awareness. While only a participant who used series of books which aligned the international curriculum with Indonesian national curriculum, the other two participants used series of books published in Singapore and London with emphasis on internationally-content based to meet fully requirements of the Cambridge International Examinations Primary Science Curriculum Framework. Each intercultural practice was also discussed in this article. Suggestions are proposed to facilitate an interculturality integrated CLIL science pedagogy that is relevant to Indonesia's socio-educational context.

Implementation of CLIL Program in Islamic Affiliated Primary School: Teaching Assistants Project

“…Because it uses dual-focused activities that address both language and content aspects, the CLIL approach is primarily appropriate for teaching English at the primary level. The implementation of thematic lessons, in which the topics of the lesson are integrated from various content areas such as math, science, civic education, and physical education (PE), supports the CLIL program in the context of Indonesian primary schools (Setyaningrum & Khoiriyah, 2022;Yusrina et al, 2018). By implementing this approach, EFL students in primary school are expected to receive an ample language exposure as well as the content knowledge related to the thematic lesson.…”