Re-examining the role of language in Chemistry in the senior secondary curriculum of Hong Kong with Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) Approach

Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education examinations (HKEAA) are used to recognise students' abilities for their future pathways after secondary education. When teachers want to review the teaching effectiveness of their curriculum design, candidates' performance reports in public exams are essential tools for educators to reflect on their teaching effectiveness.

According to the candidates' performance reports of chemistry (HKEAA, 2012 – 2022), students have been working to tackle subject misconceptions. However, students are still weak in communicating subject matters through English at word, sentence and text levels. This presents an opportunity for educators to implement a more comprehensive teaching programme to tackle the linguistic challenges of students, with Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) offering a promising solution.

This action research with multiple cycles includes a 2-year longitudinal study, a significant undertaking, of how content and language integrated learning (CLIL) approaches such as literate talk (Luk & Lin, 2015) with modified multimodalities and entextualisation cycle (MEC) (Lin, 2016) were employed in a Hong Kong Chemistry classroom from Grade 10 to Grade 11 to facilitate meaning-making processes between the teacher-researcher and students. Students' summative assessment data were collected and analysed qualitatively and quantitively. Results show that students kept their academic standards even when chemistry content knowledge became increasingly difficult. Moreover, the majority of the students achieved most of the elements in the 4Cs in CLIL, as suggested by Coyle et al., (2010), implying that the framework is useful in increasing students' content and language proficiency while eliminating most of the mistakes suggested by the HKEAA.