Section 3 - Research area

  A recent choice: Content Based English

  It is well known that one of the major problems affecting the results of high school students’ learning is lack of motivation; in English learning we have to add the problem represented  by the fact that, year after year, the classes become all mixed ability classes. Moving the focus of lessons from language to content, making the students process new information through English, and using  authentic material from different sources may represent some effective ways to face both of the problems. This could seem a paradox, as authentic materials are difficult to understand, and production skills involved in handling contents are complex. Production implies comprehension of inputs and personal processing, but in this type of activities in which students use the language with the purpose of acquiring and communicating new knowledge, students can work at their own speed just like it happens in using their own mother tongue. They can memorize what they need or what they can; they can produce by using the language they are able to master. They can exploit all their potentialities if language is strictly connected to a theme and if language is not viewed as the direct target of the activities, but “simply” a key to learn the content. Of course the teacher will devote part of the weekly lessons in introducing and practising the necessary structures and vocabulary and this can be seen by the students like a sort of inevitable exercise, similar to the physical training an athlete has to do if he wants to win the game, which is the real performance.

This is roughly speaking what is called Content Based Instruction:  "CBI implies the total integration of language learning and content learning. It represents a significant departure from traditional foreign language teaching methods in that language proficiency is achieved by shifting the focus of instruction from the learning of language per se to the learning of language through the study of the subject matter" (Stryker and Leaver 1997).

The characteristics of a curriculum based on this approach are fundamentally three:

1) it is centred on the content of a subject, 2) it is based on the use of authentic language materials, 3) it is built up according to the students’ linguistic and learning needs.

Which contents can be considered the best to be learned through a foreign language? If we want to create in the English classes a real communicative environment we should use English for the same purpose the mother tongue is principally used in class: to learn contents of the different school subjects. This is the fundamental assumption on which I have based the planning of some teaching modules I have been carrying out for three years.

There may be a lot of perplexities about teaching English as Content Based Instruction: 1) the students do not have an adequate level of language competence to fulfil their tasks of studying new contents in English and the result will be an oversimplification of the content itself; 2) the authentic material is too difficult to comprehend and the consequence will be students’ frustration and demotivation; 3) the students will tend not to use English when the concepts are too difficult to express; 4) students will not use English when talking to one another; 5) the most reserved and insecure students will be always silent during the lessons…

The doubts and the perplexities can be many, for this reason the challenge is to make all this the target of my research. The issues I want to observe and evaluate in acting the two modules I have mentioned are expressed in the following question: