As far back as 1996, The Ministry of Education of Thailand announced the application of the English curriculum in elementary education together with the development of bilingual programs to improve Thai learners' English language proficiency. In these programs, such subjects as Science, Mathematics, Art and Technology, Health and Physical education are taught in English, used as a contextualized language, by native speaker teachers. The main ideas underlying these programs are that they will enable learners both to develop their language skills and acquire content-knowledge. Nevertheless, the National Test administered in 2004-2006¹ showed that Grade 6 learners' achievements in English were not satisfying. Shortcomings were found in the provision of the curriculum itself and in the way the curriculum contents were planned and designed by teachers. Most schools were ambitious in prescribing the learning contents, leading to overfilled curriculum. These results sparked off debates about the learning and teaching of English in elementary education and raised several key-questions about the way bilingual programs are implemented in some pilot schools that follow the official instructions defined by The Ministry of Education. How is English really taught and learned in bilingual and ordinary sections? How do students develop academic skills while learning English in bilingual sections? What techniques do teachers use to provide content knowledge? Such are some of the questions we examine in our research that seeks to compare the way English and Science are taught and learned in a bilingual and an ordinary program in Grade 6 classes (learners aged 12) in a public school in Nakhonsawan, Thailand. Thus, our corpus is composed of eight teaching units (48 lessons) filmed in three different classes: one in the ordinary section and two in the bilingual section. Three of the filmed teaching units are devoted to the teaching and learning of English, three others to the teaching and learning of Science in Thai and the last two to the teaching and learning of Science in English. For this presentation, we will focus on the two teaching units whose contents, centered on the interaction between the environment and living things, are taught in English. In doing so, we will examine the action of a native teacher in the two classes that follow the bilingual program.

The theoretical tools we use to conduct our analyzes are borrowed from five main fields. Thus, the main notions come from bilingual didactics (in particular, Hamers & Blanc, 1983 ; Berthoud & Gajo, 1998 ; Duverger, 2005), from non linguistic didactics (in particular, Berthoud & Gajo, 2005 ; Duverger, 2009), from foreign language didactics (in particular, Coste, 2002 ; Gaonac’h, 2006 ; Gruson, 2009), from science didactics (in particular, Astolfi, Darot, Ginsburger-Vogel & Toussaint, 1997 ; Johsua & Dupin, 2003) and from the joint action theory in didactics (Sensevy & Mercier, 2007 ; Schubauer-Leoni & al., 2007). This on-going research is the opportunity to put those theoretical frameworks to the test of precise empirical data and thus to probe their heuristic relevance and to evaluate their potential convergence.

1English Language Institute, Office of The Basic Education Commission of Thailand. http://english.obec.go.th/english/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=33&Itemid=70

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