This article reports on a study of the pedagogies of two content-trained teachers and two language-trained teachers in their content-based second language (L2) classrooms at the middle-school level in two Chinese contexts: Hong Kong and Xi'an. The study aims to identify pedagogies that support content and language learning, referred to here as "content and language pedagogies." The findings suggest that while the complex content at the middle-school level leads to correspondingly more complex language use, which therefore provides a strong foundation for advancing both content and language learning, the content must be explored in depth and from different perspectives to enable complex knowledge relationships to be co-constructed by the teacher and students through the use of correspondingly complex language to support this learning. This requires teachers to be aware of language form-function relationships.