Under Taiwan’s Bilingual Nation 2030 initiative, education of all levels has seen challenges and aspirations on the way towards the EMI/CLIL teaching model. Teacher training becomes critical as teachers play a pivotal role in successful transition from the monolingual context to the bilingual environment. University training programs are tasked with providing support to ease classroom teachers into the new approaches and additional language demand.

It is in this context that the presenter will report on the progress of a needs assessment project on teacher training. The virtual project involves observing ten recorded lessons and conducting online post-observation conferences with the ten teachers, who are of various STEAM subjects and different grade levels, ranging from 4 to 11. The project has found that the teachers, be they of English or STEAM, are struggling to straddle both content and language in the classroom. They appear to wrestle with the idea of having to break down silos and incorporate added learning aims. While teachers have relatively clear understanding of the EMI/CLIL approaches on the conceptual level, it is observed that making an EMI/CLIL lesson an organic whole requires sustainable training effort in the implementation stage.

The project is ongoing at the time of the conference; therefore, the presentation will summarize the progress thus far, including teachers’ various approaches to incorporate EMI/CLIL in the classroom and preliminary findings of the needs assessment. Audience will be informed of emerging training needs and thoughts on the design of a teacher training curriculum for the Taiwan context.