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, observational notes, and post-observation debriefings through Video-stimulated Reflective Dialogue (VSRD) (e.g., Hargreaves et al., 2003) to triangulate Wang Laoshi’s plan, instructional practice, and her voices to track the entire process of how she made sense of, adapted, and enacted the mathematics and Chinese curricula to teach different categories of academic vocabulary. The study unpacks the three categories of academic vocabulary that Wang Laoshi taught in her mathematics classrooms and the two trajectories for employing various strategies to teach the different categories of academic vocabulary. The findings echoes to previous research and suggested that Wang Laoshi’s academic vocabulary instruction falls in a continuum between language-intense and content-intense (e.g., Domingez et al., 2018). Therefore, I argue that instead of calling for maintaining a strict balance between language and content teaching in class, teachers should handle the tension between language and content through an understanding of the written curriculum, and in accordance with the students’ learning needs as they are enacting it. The findings also unveiled various social factors that influenced Wang Laoshi’s sensemaking in enacting the two written curricula, and subsequently impacted her decision-making during academic vocabulary teaching. The study sheds light on the complexity of FLI teachers’ academic vocabulary instruction through making sense of, adapting, and enacting a Chinese and a mathematics curriculum. Furthermore, it advanced our ideas about the role of social factors in the planning and instruction by FLI teachers. Its methodological and pedagogical implications will hopefully help to better prepare FLI teachers with a dual curricula in FLI programs to scaffold their planning and teaching academic vocabulary to support students language and content learning.
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