Background: Collaboration between Speech and Language Therapists (SLTs) and parents is considered best practice for children with developmental disorders. However, such collaborative approach is not yet implemented in therapy for children with developmental language disorders (DLD) in the Netherlands. Improving Dutch SLTs’ collaboration with parents requires insight in factors that influence the way SLTs work with parents. Aims: To explore the specific beliefs of Dutch SLTs that influence how they collaborate with parents of children with DLD. Methods and procedures: We conducted three online focus groups with 17 SLTs using a reflection tool and fictional examples of parents to prompt their thoughts, feelings and actions on specific scenarios. Data were organised using the Theoretical Domains Framework (TDF). Outcomes and results: We identified 34 specific beliefs across nine TDF domains on how SLTs collaborate with parents of children with DLD. The results indicate that SLTs hold beliefs on how to support SLTs in collaborating with parents but also conflicting specific beliefs regarding collaborative work with parents. The latter relate to SLTs’ perspectives on their professional role and identity, their approach towards parents, and their confidence and competence in working collaboratively with parents.
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Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is a dual-focused educational approach whereby an additional language is used for the learning and teaching of both content and language. In the Netherlands, this takes place in bilingual secondary education (tweetalig onderwijs). Policy guidelines, teaching handbooks, research and teacher education primarily focused on how subject teachers implement CLIL. Little was known about the nature and range of the pedagogical and collaborative practices of language teachers in this context. Exploring formal and practical theories of teaching, this dissertation reports on four studies; a literature review, focus group study, survey, and multiple-case study. These generated building blocks for a knowledge base for Teachers of English in Bilingual streams (TEBs) including a theoretical framework for language teaching in CLIL contexts, a set of practices which emerged as a professional development tool for TEBs, eight case descriptions of prototypical practices, and a model of the dynamic interaction of TEBs’ beliefs and practices. Reviewing the findings in the light of developments in conceptualizing what CLIL means for teachers in practice, the discussion highlights four points. Firstly, language teaching in CLIL contexts is not the same as foreign language teaching. Secondly, CLIL achieves integration through subject-specific language. Thirdly, CLIL contexts can lead to transformative change in language teachers’ beliefs and practices. Fourthly, collaboration between language and subject teachers can be beneficial. It concludes that teacher education and policy guidelines can and should do more to support, encourage and enable language teachers to be both creators and agents of change.
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This paper introduces our special issue about ideologies in sign language vitality and revitalization and discusses ideologies related to the vitality of sign languages. Rather than taking for granted the notions of vitality and endangerment or developing criteria for measuring sign language vitality, the papers in this issue will provide a discursive construction of sign language endangerment. This construction in turn provides critical and historical reflection on how vitality has emerged as a concern for sign languages in specific local, national, and international contexts, the actors and institutions bringing forward this framing, and in whose interest it is to promote such discourses. The issue will survey how and by whom these ideologies are described, mobilized and legitimized, and what conceptualizations of language are emphasized and by whom.
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