Assessing Students' Discipline-Specific Comprehension Ability in a Secondary English Medium Instruction Economics Classroom: The Role of Teacher–Researcher Collaboration

Research has revealed the challenges English-medium instruction (EMI) students face in reading disciplinary-specific texts for knowledge building and highlighted the potential advantages of collaboration between language and content experts in assessment to support EMI student learning. However, a paucity of studies has been conducted on how EMI content teachers and linguistic researchers can collaborate to leverage assessment in supporting diagnosing students’ comprehension challenges and needs. This chapter delves into a teacher-researcher collaboration (TRC) study involving two EMI secondary economics teachers and two researchers (one from applied linguistics and one from EMI education) working collectively to design the English reading assessments for economics learning and interpret the assessed results. This TRC-based assessment included four steps: co-exploration of problems, co-design of assessments, co-evaluation of outcomes, and core-reflection on instruction. Data was gathered from teacher-researcher discussion audio-recordings, collaborative shared documents, and classroom observations. The findings revealed that, with careful consideration of symmetrical and complementary roles played by both sides, TRC-based assessment equipped content teachers with methods in assessment design and results analysis. This facilitated a detailed understanding of their students’ disciplinary-specific reading abilities. The co-reflection stage also encouraged their revision of previous teaching approaches, which were predominantly with teacher-led reading and translating with minimal instruction on the language used for building economic reasoning. This article suggests that TRC-based assessment can be an effective approach to empower EMI content teachers’ awareness and capability in providing ongoing tailored language support and disciplinary literacy instruction in relation to their content teaching.
Copyright © 2025 Jack Pun, Samantha Curle, Pramod K. Sah and the authors of individual chapters.