Teaching history in bilingual secondary education in the Netherlands Perceptions, classroom practice and learning outcomes

Bilingual education has managed to secure a solid position in the Dutch education system as approximately 1 out of every 5 schools for secondary education has a bilingual department. Bilingual education is based on Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) pedagogy, whereby students are taught the second language through teaching and learning subject knowledge.
Research into bilingual education has mainly focused on the development of students’ second language (L2) proficiency. The role and performance of the bilingual education subject teachers has received little attention, which is unexpected as they are key players in this process. This research focusses on the role and performance of history teachers in bilingual education in the Netherlands. History is known to be a linguistically demanding subject, even for mainstream students. Since most bilingual education history teachers also teach in mainstream, we were able to compare their history teaching on the same topics in both languages.
We conducted four studies to get a better understanding of the role and position of the bilingual history education teacher. First, we explored how the bilingual education history teachers experienced and perceived teaching CLIL using their non-native language. Secondly, we performed teacher observations in grades 7 and 9 to establish if there were differences between the self-reported experiences and perceptions and the reality of classroom teaching by a) closely observing how teachers dealt with the L2 component of the CLIL-lesson, and b) by analyzing the effect of teaching in English on the pedagogical content knowledge of the history teachers. Finally, we wanted to see which basic history content knowledge the students had learned after one and three years of CLIL history teaching.