‘It’s about seeing the connections’: exploring teacher collaboration across the school’s language subjects

Abstract

Students typically learn multiple languages in school. Yet, language teachers rarely collaborate across the school’s language subjects to enhance students’ learning. Moreover, limited research has explored how teacher collaboration across language subjects can be implemented and to what extent it influences students’ multilingual awareness, language learning, and teachers’ professional development. This study describes and evaluates a novel initiative at a Norwegian upper secondary school, where teachers first identified shared learning objectives across the Norwegian, English, and foreign language curricula, and then dissolved language-specific classes for one week to develop and implement a cross-linguistic program. The article aims to provide a comprehensive description and analysis of the language teachers’ practices and experiences during this collaborative effort. The innovative approach and its evaluation by the teachers offer insights into facilitating teacher collaboration and students’ multilingual awareness across various educational contexts and language subjects. Moreover, the teachers’ experiences suggest that such interdisciplinary collaboration can be just as beneficial for teachers’ professional development as it is for their students’ learning processes.