Focus Groups

Abstract

The research described in this chapter constituted the first of three linked phases within a PhD project designed to investigate team-teaching at a Japanese institution of tertiary education (Gladman, 2009). This institution, Miyazaki International College (MIC), is a liberal arts college using English as its medium of instruction. Within nearly all of its first-year and second-year classes, MIC employs an unusual team-teaching practice, called collaborative interdisciplinary team-teaching (CITT). In each CITT class, a specialist in teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) and a specialist in the academic subject of the class integrate their specialties to team-teach English language and the academic subject in parallel, as derived from content-based language instruction (CBLI) models (Brinton et al., 1989). The team-teachers adopt a highly collaborative approach, teaching each course jointly as equal partners, being present together in the classroom at all lesson times and sharing responsibility for all aspects of their course, including lesson planning, materials development, assessment and evaluation.