Content-Based Second Language Teaching

Content-Based Second Language Teaching

Content-based second language teaching is an instructional approach in which non linguistic

content, including subject matter such as social studies or mathematics, is taught to students
through the medium of a language that is not their first, so that while they are learning
curricular content they are also learning an additional language.
 Content-Based Second Language Teaching

As Snow, Met, and Genesee (1989) argued, language development and cognitive development go
hand-in hand, yet more traditional methods tend to separate language development from general
cognitive development, isolating the target language from any substantive content except for the
mechanical workings of the language itself. Content-based instruction, in contrast, is designed to
integrate language and cognitive development.
 Content-Based Second Language Teaching

Content-based second language teaching has often been referred to as the “two for one”
approach (e.g., Lightbown & Spada, 2006), because learners in these programs learn subject
matter and the target language at the same time. It has been widely documented that majority-
language speakers learning an additional language through immersion indeed succeed in
mastering the content as well as if they were learning it through their first language, at no
expense to their first language (e.g., Genesee, 1987; Turnbull, Lapkin, & Hart, 2001).
 Content-Based Instruction
in Second Language Teaching

Content–based Instruction refers to an approach to second language teaching in

which is organized around the context or information that students will acquire,
rather than around a linguistic or other type of syllabus.
 Historical Context of Content-Based Instruction Approach
in Second Language Teaching

During 3 decades the CBI has increasingly been used in different educational contexts:
◦ English for specific purposes programs.
◦ English for Business / Science and technology.
◦ Second language immersion programs for primary and secondary students.
◦ Intensive language Courses.
◦ Bilingual Education (Language across the Curriculum)

According to Brinton, Snow and Wesche (1989) St. Augustine was an early proponent of Content
Based Language Teaching as he recommended to focus on meaningful content in language
teaching.
Teacher Collaboration

Working in content-based foreign language instruction (e.g., Pessoa, Hendry, Donato,

Tucker, & Lee, 2007) or content-based ESL (e.g., Duff, 2001), many researchers concur that
the success of content-based instruction is contingent upon ongoing collaboration among
teachers.

In immersion contexts, where students receive instruction in two languages, collaboration

between teachers of each language is likely to streng then the academic literacy development
of children in both languages. In this vein, Lyster, Collins, and Ballinger (2009) conducted a
study in Quebec of three French immersion classrooms composed heterogeneously of
French-dominant, English dominant, and French/English bilingual students.
Obstacles to Integration

Obstacles preventing a more systematic integration of language and content instruction, as well as
more explicit connections between first and second language literacy development, may derive from at
least two unresolved issues about the nature of language instruction in content-based approaches.

First, is language learning in content-based second language teaching a primary or secondary goal?
Genesee (1994) argued that “language learning in immersion is secondary to academic achievement”
(p. 2). However, Met (1998, p. 40) suggested that, in content-driven immersion programs, “student
mastery of content may share equal importance with the development of language proficiency.” Allen,
Swain, Harley, and Cummins (1990, p. 75) stated that, in immersion “language and content learning
are equally important goals,” and Echevarría et al. (2008) advocated clear identification of both
content and language objectives in their model of sheltered content based ESL instruction.
Second, ‘incidental’ is a word that was initially attributed to the process of both teaching and
learning language through content (e.g., Genesee, 1987; Snow, 1987; Swain & Lapkin, 1982;
more recently, see Long, 2007), usually with a disclaimer, however, that “incidental” is neither
tantamount to “haphazard” (Snow, 1987) nor at odds with systematicity (Genesee, 1987).

Lyster (2007) illustrated how incidental attention to language is often too brief and perfunctory
to convey sufficient information about certain grammatical subsystems and thus, in those cases,
can be considered neither systematic nor apt to make the most of content-based instruction as a
means for teaching language.
Counterbalanced Instruction

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (Brown, 1993), the term “counterbalance” refers to “a
power or influence that balances the effect of a contrary one” and is used here in this sense to bring a
new perspective to the seemingly paradoxical endeavor of learning and teaching language through non
linguistic curricular content.

Based on a synthesis of classroom SLA research that has helped to shape evolving perspectives of
content-based instruction since the introduction of immersion programs in Montreal more than 40 years
ago, this book presents an updated perspective on integrating language and content in ways that engage
second language learners with language across the curriculum. A range of instructional practices
observed in immersion and content-based classrooms is highlighted to set the stage for justifying a
counterbalanced approach that integrates both content-based and form-focused instructional options as
complementary ways of intervening to develop a learner’s inter language system.
A counterbalanced approach is outlined as an array of opportunities for learners to
process language through content by means of comprehension, awareness, and production
mechanisms, and to negotiate language through content by means of interactional
strategies involving teacher scaffolding and feedback.

Lyster, 2007, (p. 135) illustrates the content-based and form-focused instructional options that
are essential components of content-based second language teaching.

11
Instructional Input
Content-Based Input
The goal of teachers throughout any type of content-based program is to enable students to
comprehend the curriculum presented through the second language

Making subject-matter input comprehensible through a learner’s second language is no small

undertaking because it is imperative that curricular content itself not be simplified to the point of
shortchanging students (Echevarría et al., 2008; Met, 1994, 1998).
Content-based second language teachers
Known to modify their speech by speaking more slowly in the beginning grades, emphasizing key words or
phrases and using cognates, restricted vocabulary, and shorter phrases.

They build redundancy into their speech by using discourse modifications such as self-repetition, modeling, and
paraphrase (Tardif, 1994), as well as multiple examples, definitions, and synonyms to give students many chances
to understand the target language.

Provide natural pauses between phrases to give students time to process language and also to give students
appropriate “wait time” to interpret questions and formulate responses (Cloud et al., 2000).

In tandem with their verbal input, teachers use props, graphs, and other graphic organizers (see Early, 2001;
Mohan, 1986), as well as various visual and multimedia resources (see Echevarría et al., 2008).

To further facilitate comprehension, teachers rely on extensive body language, including gestures and facial
expressions, and a range of paralinguistic elements.
Content based teachers
Ensure predictability and repetition in instructional routines by using clear boundary markers between
activities to orchestrate daily routines in a way that maximizes classroom discipline and opportunities for
learning (Mendez, 1992; Salomone, 1992a).

Draw extensively on their students’ background knowledge to aid comprehension, and they also draw on
students to help one another understand content lessons.

The notion that learners can and should be exposed to language just ahead of their current level of ability
(e.g., Krashen, 1982, 1985, 1994), rather than being exposed only to language they already know, is
essential to content-based second language teaching.
Instructional techniques that ensure the comprehension of subject matter taught through the
medium of the students’ second language are at the core of content-based approaches and are
requisite for students’ academic success

The limits of an exclusively comprehension-based approach to language instruction, is the

continued use of strategies that rely too much on gestures and other visual and non linguistic
support may, over time, have negative effects on the development of students’ communicative
ability in the second language
Swain (1985) argued that exposure to extensive input via subject-matter instruction engages
comprehension strategies that enable students to process language semantically but not
necessarily syntactically, allowing them to bypass structural information and to rely instead on
pragmatic and situational cues

Swain (1988, 1996) argued accordingly that content teaching needs to be manipulated and
complemented in ways that maximize second language learning, and suggested that, to do so,
teachers need to draw students’ attention to specific form/meaning mappings by creating contrived
contexts that allow students to notice second language features in their full functional range
Form-Focused Input
The need for learners to notice target features in the input, in order to process them as intake, is a crucial
first step in second language learning (Schmidt, 1990)

in order for input to become intake, some degree of noticing must occur, and what gets noticed in the input
depends on mediating factors such as prior knowledge and skill, task demands, frequency, and perceptual
salience (Gass, 1988; Schmidt, 1990, 1994).

In classroom settings, noticing can also be triggered by input features that have been contrived for
instructional purposes through “input enhancement” designed to make certain forms more salient in the
input, through color coding or boldfacing in the case of written input, and through intonational stress and
gestures in the case of oral input (Sharwood Smith, 1993).
Phases of Noticing
At least two phases are required for learners to notice target features in a manner robust enough to make the forms available as intake:
1. A Noticing Phase
learners engage primarily in receptive processing during activities designed to move the learner toward more target-like representations of the second
language
activities serve as catalysts for drawing learners’ attention to problematic target features that have been contrived to appear more salient and/or frequent in
oral and written input
2. An Awareness Phase.
 Awareness activities require learners to do more than merely notice enhanced forms in the input and instead to engage in some degree of elaboration
(Sharwood Smith, 1981, 1993).
 learners engage either receptively or productively, or both, in activities designed to consolidate the cognitive restructuring of rule-based declarative
representations. Such elaboration may include inductive rule-discovery tasks and opportunities to compare and contrast language patterns, followed by
different types of metalinguistic information.
 aim is to strengthen students’ metalinguistic awareness, which then serves as a tool for extracting linguistic information from content-based input and thus
for learning language through subject- matter instruction
STUDENT PRODUCTION

To complement input-driven instructional techniques, content-based second

language teachers need also to ensure that their students’ opportunities to use the
second language continue to expand both in quantity and quality.
Content-Based Tasks
Content-based instruction is thought to provide ideal contexts for second language
learning to occur naturally, because of the countless opportunities for authentic and
purposeful use of the target language generated by the study of subject matter
(Snow et al., 1989).

Genesee (1987, p. 176) argued that the academic curriculum stimulates language
development by placing increasingly high levels of cognitive and linguistic
demands on students.
Genesee (1987, p. 176) proposed that
academic (i.e., content-based) tasks themselves, rather than a language-based syllabus, as a basis for
stimulating second language development, but added that “maximum language learning in immersion
will probably result only to the extent that the curriculum exploits opportunities for discourse in the
service of academic achievement.”

a process approach to content-based second language teaching whereby “certain interactional processes
of a discoursal nature,” hypothesized to contribute to language development, are instantiated in academic
tasks, which in turn govern the actual units of language to be learned: “It follows that second language
learning will then proceed in response to the communication demands of academic work, given certain
motivational conditions” (see also Brinton, Snow, & Wesche, 2004).
Effective content teaching is generally considered to include hands-on tasks that engage learners in opportunities
for in-depth understanding and for “learning by doing” (Bruner, 1971)

Content-based tasks need to include a writing phase that requires learners to use the target language for academic
purposes without the contextual support that normally scaffolds oral interaction.  In achieving oral fluency by
ignoring accuracy or by concentrating on a narrow repertoire of language, learners are not necessarily pushed to
extend and refine their interlanguage system.
Form-Focused Practice
DeKeyser, 1998, p. 50) Practice can be broadly defi ned as “engaging in an activity with the goal of
becoming better at it” and more specifically in reference to second language learning as “specifi c activities
in the second language, engaged in systematically, deliberately, with the goal of developing knowledge of
and skills in the second language”

In their observation study of immersion classrooms, Allen et al. (1990) reported that the “speech acts which
occur naturally in the classroom context may provide little opportunity for students to produce the full range
of target language forms” (p. 74) and recommended that teachers implement “carefully planned and guided
communicative practice that will push students towards the production of comprehensible output” (p. 76).
At one end of the practice spectrum, controlled practice activities engage learners’ awareness of rule-based representations
and are thus useful for circumventing their over-reliance on communication strategies and effecting change in the
interlanguage (Ranta & Lyster, 2007).

At the other end of the practice spectrum, communicative practice activities engage learners in more open-ended and
meaning-focused tasks with fewer constraints to ensure accuracy, thus proving effective for promoting confidence and
motivation to use the second language, and for providing a safe playing field for students to try out communication strategies

A good example of both controlled and communicative practice is evident in the content-driven activities used in Doughty
and Varela’s (1998) classroom study, which took place in a content-based ESL science class, targeting the simple past and the
conditional past in the context of science experiments
Classroom Interaction
This section considers the central role played by teachers as they interact with students during whole class
activities with the dual aim of enhancing their students’ content knowledge and second language
development.

Content-based second language teachers need to counterbalance diverse opportunities to negotiate

language through content by means of instructional options that include a wide range of questioning and
scaffolding techniques as well as a variety of corrective feedback moves.
in the context of sheltered ESL instruction, Echarvarría and Graves (1998) identified questioning techniques
designed to enrich “instructional conversations” (see Tharpe & Gallimore, 1988) and to facilitate students’
understanding of ideas and concepts that they would otherwise be unable to express on their own.

to create more opportunities for extended student responses specifically in CLIL classrooms, Dalton-Puffer
(2006) recommended that teachers use fewer questions eliciting facts, which tend to result in minimal
responses, and more questions about students’ beliefs and opinions that require them to explain, define, or
give reasons
 Content-Based Negotiation
In second language acquisition research, conversational moves used in dyadic interaction to facilitate
comprehension and hypothesized to benefit second language development are generally subsumed
under the rubric of “negotiation for meaning,” which comprises clarification requests, confirmation
checks (including recasts and repetition), and comprehension checks (Long, 1996).

Although negotiation for meaning has been advocated as a central feature of content-based instruction
(e.g., Genesee, 1987; Met, 1994; Rebuffot, 1993; Tardif, 1991), its component moves, while useful for
moving conversations forward, have not proven as effective in classroom settings as in laboratory
settings for focusing learners’ attention on form (Aston, 1986; Foster, 1998; Foster & Ohta, 2005;
Lyster; 2002, 2007)
For example

 in post-secondary content-based classes of Italian as a foreign language,

Musumeci (1996) reported that the teachers viewed negotiation for meaning less as a language
teaching strategy and more as a social strategy “to help the student get through the exchange as
painlessly as possible” (p. 316). Musumeci (1996) also found that teachers “appear to understand
absolutely everything the students say” (p. 314). They strove to derive meaning from students’ speech
and, to do so, “supplied key lexical items and provided rich interpretations of student responses, rather
than engage in the kind of negotiation which would have required learners to modify their own
output” (p. 314).
Form-Focused Negotiation
Swain (1985) argued that teachers, in order to benefit their students’ interlanguage development, need to
incorporate ways of “pushing” students to produce language that is not only comprehensible, but also
accurate.

Lyster and Ranta (1997) observed different feedback types that immersion teachers have at their disposal
and then identified which feedback types tended more than others to “push” learners to modify their non-
target output.
 Six different types of feedback by Lyster and Ranta (1997)
1. recasts  supply learners with target reformulations of their non-target output. Whereas a recast is considered
implicit insofar as it contains no metalinguistic information
2. explicit correction supply learners with target reformulations of their non-target output, contains the correct form
as well as a clear indication that what the student said was inaccurate
3. clarification request
grouped together as “prompts,”  they withhold correct forms and instead
4. repetition of error
offer learners an opportunity to self-repair by generating their own modified
5. Elicitation response (Lyster, 2004a; Lyster & Mori, 2006; Ranta & Lyster, 2007)
6. metalinguistic clues.
Teacher Vignettes
1. Vignette 1 (Gibbons, 1998, 2003)  The teacher interacted with individual students in ways that scaffolded their
contributions, allowing for communication to proceed while providing access to new linguistic data. The teacher’s
elicitation of more appropriate language (“let’s start using our scientific language”) resulted in longer and more complete
learner discourse than did simply recasting.

2. Vignette 2 (Laplante, 1993) interaction with students had a pedagogical function that encouraged language production
on the part of the students and allowed them to negotiate the unfolding of certain activities.

3. Vignette 3 (Lyster, 1998b)  teacher, drew attention to relevant language features as she interacted with students during a
science lesson, maintained a central focus on meaning yet succeeded in eliciting synonyms, antonyms, homophones, more
precise terms, words with similar structural properties, as well as correct grammatical gender, spelling, and pronunciation,
frequently used prompts that led students to experiment with language in creative ways, and also led students along a
continuum from hearing and using general all-purpose verbs to more specific ones.
5. Vignette 4 (Day & Shapson, 1996). teacher created a language- rich science classroom that became a veritable arena of communication. Her
students engaged in both “doing” science and collaboratively talking about it, Students were encouraged to speculate, justify, and be comfortable
with the view that there might be “no right answer” to some questions, even though the teacher had clear learning objectives and structured her
classes accordingly, Many opportunities for students to produce the second language and to communicate with one another arose inherently out of
what was being learned, fusing language and science “into a unified whole” (p. 55) and enabling students to use a wide variety of language
functions and structures.
6. Vignette 5 (Lapkin & Swain, 1996), teacher, presented a combined science and language arts lesson on the greenhouse effect, which was carefully
planned yet presented in the guise of a spontaneous class discussion, adopted a multifaceted approach to lexical instruction, drawing attention to
phonological, grammatical, syntactic, sociolinguistic, and discourse-related aspects of vocabulary, in addition to meaning. The strategies included
repetition, use of multiple synonyms in their characteristic syntactic frames, and revisiting words in a variety of contexts and in different parts of
the lesson.
7. Vignette 6 (Kong, 2009). This comparative study of teachers in Hong Kong late immersion classrooms and in content-based foreign language
classrooms in China revealed various instructional practices propitious for integrating language and content. For example, effective teachers
implemented cyclical lessons (i.e., exploration with students from multiple perspectives) rather than linear lessons (i.e., coverage of a list of facts)
as a way of providing students with multiple opportunities to explore and revisit content and content-related language. Effective teachers also
organized complex content according to knowledge relationships (e.g., cause–effect, hypothesis, comparison), which were actualized in targeted
language forms used explicitly and consistently (e.g., “lead to” and “result in” for cause-effect relationships; if-conditional clauses for
hypothesis).
THANK YOU
&
GOODBYE
MUHAMMAD SALEH
THALIA QAULAN TSAQIILA
S A RY W I S U D AWAT I