Teacher’s Perspectives and Practice of Multilingualism in a Qazaqstan Secondary School

Linguistic diversity, particularly within a STEM programme, is increasingly a desired competency in high schools world-wide. The way in which teachers enact multilingualism in their classrooms is dependent on historical and current, cultural and ideological influences operating within each context. Research suggests there is a knowledge gap concerning how teachers manage integrated, multilingual programmes and how these programmes impact on the teaching and learning processes. What constitutes best practice is uncertain. In Qazaqstan many ambiguities persist about how to scale such a programme country wide (Bridges, 2014) and questions are raised about how to train and prepare future teachers for implementing the trilingual education curricula. The success of such an ambitious programme lies with those tasked with its implementation. The methodology teachers use is known as Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL). This paper comments on how such a multilingual programme policy has been transferred into practice within the context of a high school in Qazaqstan, and comments on what is working in terms of the teaching processes as well as highlighting some of the barriers teachers face. By means of a case study, using a mixed methods format, the author finds that multilingualism in the Science classroom has revealed some positive outcomes in terms of raising teachers’ self-efficacy. However, delivery of content to optimise student learning is dependent on the linguistic skill of the teacher, this requires more careful planning in order to ensure programme sustainability.