Pseudo-Compliance or Convergence? Content Teachers Work Together to Learn about Language

This paper reports on a professional learning (PL) project conducted over one year at a senior secondary school in New Zealand. Subject teachers volunteered to work with one another and a facilitator to identify the linguistic demands of their subjects, adapt teaching materials, and try out teaching approaches congruent with research evidence about teaching emergent bilingual (EB) learners. This paper explores cases of subject-specific partnerships and how participants' responses to the PL appeared to impact their existing pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). The PL sessions were facilitated through audio-recorded Zoom meetings. A thematic analysis was conducted, and the findings were analysed using an adaptation of Davison's (2006) framework to map how participants engaged with the PL and collaborated with one another on new pedagogies. The study suggests that these teachers accommodated linguistic teaching approaches, but their adaptation to language PCK may have remained at a compliant level.