Content and Language Instruction Models in the United States and Asia: A Comparative Study of Sheltered Instruction and Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL)

Designing effective instructions for multilingual learners is a complex process, and scholars have addressed this phenomenon from multiple angles including power structures (Horner & Weber, 2018), social inequality (Lyster, 2019; Morita-Mullaney, 2024), curricular subject learning (Grapin et al., 2021), and teacher education (Tigert & Peercy, 2018). To support multilingual learners, one prime research area is content learning, without which their education will fall behind. In the United States, Sheltered Instruction (SI)—distilled into the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol—is one research-based education model that makes content-area instruction comprehensible for students who are not yet proficient in the language of instruction (Echevarria et al., 2023). Parallel to this development, the European Commission developed Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) in the 1990s as a bilingual education model to promote the integration of content and language in content-area courses taught in a target foreign language (Coyle et al., 2010). Since its inception, CLIL has been adopted in Europe and later expanded into Asia and South America as foreign language pedagogies (Dalton-Puffer, 2013). Attempts to examine the crossover between SI and CLIL are seen in a recent study (Bárcena-Toyos, 2023) where the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) is used to design professional development training for CLIL teachers. This multi-article dissertation aims to study and compare the two instruction models through the selection of SI/SIOP articles in the United States (Article 3) and one international high school in Cambodia (Article 2) as well as insights from the English-medium content course in Cambodia’s higher education (Article 1). The dissertation follows a comparative case study design (Bray et al., 2014; Phillips & Schweisfurth, 2014). From each data set, I collected multiple forms of data including classroom observations, interviews, document analyses, and interviews, utilizing the following analytic methods for each data source: thematic analysis (Johnson & Christensen, 2014) and comparative analyses to compare the data sets (Bray et al., 2014; Phillips & Schweisfurth, 2014). This dissertation contributes to the research on bilingual education by offering comparative and international perspectives in education for multilingual learners through the uses of comparative education research methods to draw implications for teachers, and for policymakers, curriculum developers, and instructional designers.