• Korean Journal of Childcare and Education
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• v.9 no.5
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• pp.181-200
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• 2013

This study aimed at exploring how an instructor constructs meanings through content-based instruction (CBI) offered to pre-service teachers majoring in early childhood education. The course, early childhood mathematics education, was conducted during the spring semester in 2011. This study adopted a narrative inquiry, and data were collected through observations, interviews, and work samples. This study found that during the whole process from the preparation phase to the end-of-program evaluation, the instructor captured diverse challenging moments. During the preparation phase, she needed to have careful orchestration in designing lessons in order to overcome her feeling of pressure as a non-native speaker of English and design the integration of contents and English language learning to be truly powerful. In the phase of implementation, the lack of student motivation and building a good rapport between the instructor and the students were certainly challenges. The result of the student evaluations weakened her desire to implement CBI. The instructor incorporated diverse instructional strategies to overcome the obstacles. The instructor's experiences in this study will positively shape future educators' thinking and learning about meaningful and appropriate academic English instruction for content-area teaching of college students who were majoring in early childhood education.