EFL effective teaching: a estudy on the beliefs, teaching practices and professional cooperation of bilingual teachers in a rural school in Navarre

Abstract

Bilingual teaching programs such as CBLT and CLIL emerged in response to the linguistic requirements in nowadays’ globalised world. These bilingual programs integrate content and language when teaching and are said to be effective for FL acquisition. Knowing about the mental lives of teachers who implement these methodologies seems mandatory since their beliefs influence their teaching decisions and what they do in classrooms. Also, delving into the way these teachers cooperate is relevant since literature has long advocated the relevance that teacher cooperation has for the successful implementation of these programs. Using a qualitative design where three bilingual teachers’ beliefs and their teaching practices were analysed through questionnaires and class observation, this paper shows that teachers’ beliefs and practices are not always aligned, which can lead to cognitive problems and may affect students’ learning outcomes. In addition to this, the way these teachers cooperated was also investigated and a detailed portrait of subject coordination and teacher cooperation in the school where the study was carried out is done. Evidence shows that subject coordination and teacher cooperation in the school appeared to be superficial and incomplete. This paper defends that both a well-structured coordination between teachers and co-teaching would be key to create effective lessons through bilingual methodologies in terms of content and foreign language acquisition.