Author Description

Bilingual education in the United States basically involves English language learners (ELLs) in mainstream classes and students who are learning an additional language in a foreign language immersion (FLI) program. Although academic vocabulary instruction for ELLs has attracted increasing attention in the past two decades (e.g., McQuillan, 2019; Schleppegrell, 2009), academic language teaching in FLI programs has received much less attention. Previous studies of FLI programs have focused on exploring the tension between language and content teaching and have called for balancing language and content instruction in subject matter areas such as mathematics (e.g., Cammarata & Haley, 2018; Cammarata & Tedick, 2012). However, managing this tension and scaffolding language and content learning through academic vocabulary teaching in content areas within FLI programs is still under explored, especially Chinese immersion programs. To address this gap, this study drawing on sociocultural theory (SCT) (e.g., Lantolf, 2014; Vygotsky, 1987), analyses the academic vocabulary instruction of one Chinese immersion teacher, Wang Laoshi, to captures the complexity of teaching academic vocabulary, from planning to practice, in a mathematics classroom in Chinese. The current study described Wang Laoshi's classroom to present an example for researchers to access how she made sense of both language and content curriculum in a Chinese immersion program, and subsequently enacted those curricula in teaching academic vocabulary. The study answered three research questions: (1) To what extent does the Chinese immersion teacher teach academic vocabulary in mathematics classrooms? (2) How does she teach academic vocabulary to construct meaning and scaffold language and content teaching? and (3) How does her sensemaking of the curricula scaffold her academic vocabulary instruction? The study collected data from pre-observation interviews, curriculum materials, classroom video tapes, observationa