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Introduction: brief analysis of triennio
ESP programs and textbooks In the triennio
of Italian technical high schools (istituti tecnici) and in vocational schools in
general (the majority of Italian secondary schools), English becomes English for Special
Purposes according to the specialisation of each course. So knowledge of English should be
considered as a part of the professional portfolio that each student can offer to his/her
potential future employers. It is well known that a good mastery of English is necessary
to find any kind of job as a technician, engineer, accountant etc, both in industry and in
the service sector.
The problem is that it is not clear to Italian
institutions, textbook writers or teachers of English what students’ competence in
ESP should consist of. At first sight, the answer would seem to consist of knowledge of
specific lexis and register, and the development of the reading skill. ESP books are
mainly made up of collections of texts (usually adapted to fit students’
level),
dealing with topics related to the subject area, followed by comprehension
activities,
exercises on vocabulary and on the recurrent grammatical and text structures of so-called
"technical texts" (passive forms, relative pronouns, comparatives, modal verbs
etc/definitions, descriptions of devices, descriptions of phenomena, descriptions of
processes etc).
So the acquisition of skills and strategies related
to reading and comprehending (specially written) texts seems to be the main aim of the ESP
courses. Some textbooks, especially those written for Business English, also include
sections with units designed according to the communicative approach, usually presenting
real-life situations of people working in a field relevant to the subject area.
It can be said that the needs analysis of ESP
learners, on which the syllabus seems to be based, leads almost exclusively to possible
needs connected to the contexts in which students may in future be expected to use the
specialised language acquired at school:
- (sometimes) university context, if they go on
studying
- (almost always) work context.
According to this view, their motivation for
learning English should be extrinsic, instrumental, totally projected towards the future.
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Comments on student motivation
Learners of English as a Foreign
Language, aged 16
– 19, in the Italian context are not usually motivated, either
instrumentally/extrinsically or integratively, since teenagers see the future as a distant
perspective, and very often it is, as finding a job will be hard for many of
them.
Motivation for high school students is principally
within their present experiences both in time and space/environment (in the ‘here and
now’), not outside of them.
From this assumption some considerations have to be
taken into account:
- ESP learners do not stop being teenagers when they
start their vocational courses, so English teaching has to maintain its pedagogical
congruence with the tried and tested methods and procedures of the communicative era.
Students’ real-life interests, everyday life contexts and situations should go on
being a part of the English syllabus, as well as the recycling and reinforcing of all the
communicative strategies, in order to achieve better levels of
proficiency. We must not
forget that Italian students of the triennio in technical high schools rarely break
through the barrier of intermediate, or even pre-intermediate, levels (ie after 5 – 8
years of English) and there must be some reasons why.
- Instrumental motivation can also be intrinsic,
connected mostly to school
experience and performance. It should be focused on
students’ present study environment, the only real situation they have experience of,
which is connected both with the need to learn about specific subject matter and with the
need to learn English.
- In this view L2 can play the really communicative
role of a means for conveying,
acquiring or exchanging relevant
information/data/knowledge, that is for learning: the same role as L1.
- The only real context in which learners, playing a
real role, deal with their specific
subject matter is in their present school context
(they do not deal with Electronics, Chemistry, Business in real life or at work), so it is
normal for them to study, talk about, read, write and listen to it at school.
- The subjects they study are nearly all related to
school, or set in the school/class/ lesson context.
- The only people they expect to talk about them are
teachers.
- Thus, school is a real context, related both to
subject matter and English, in which learners have their peculiar and real roles as
learners: why not exploit such favourable conditions rather than simulating artificial,
future contexts?
- Why not exploit motivation connected to real needs
instead of forcing the students to create new ones? Why not consider school as a peculiar
period of real life, as it is in the experience of everyone, rather than only as a period
of preparation for real future life?
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ESP as
Content-Based English
If the main purpose of an ESP course is the
acquisition of linguistic skills and communicative strategies related both to the specific
cultural areas of the future target situation (work, study, etc) and the present learning
needs of the students in the real school environment, an appropriate approach might be
teaching the subject matter characterising a course (or parts of it) in English, in the
same way that the students do when using their mother tongue, that is to say using English
as a learning tool. Such an approach exists and it is called CBI (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 p5).
Sheltered content courses, adjunct
courses,
theme-based courses, and foreign languages across the curriculum (FLAC) are some of the
possible models, CBI being "more a philosophy than a methodology"
(Stryker and
Leaver ibid p3), extremely flexible and adaptable to the students’
needs, interests,
and learning styles.
The characteristics of a curriculum based on this
approach are fundamentally three:
- it is centred on the content of a subject
- it is based on the use of authentic language
materials
- it is built up according to the students’
linguistic and learning needs
The results of a great deal of research confirm the
validity of this choice by giving the only proof which can be considered reliable, that is
the levels of linguistic proficiency reached by learners in comparison with learners of
the same starting levels who have followed traditional courses. Yet, some modifications
have been suggested related to accurate use of the language in oral and written
production, which has not always been found so satisfactory as the near native-like
proficiency acquired in listening and reading, thanks to the great exposure given to
authentic language.
As a result of such research, some CBI courses are
giving more explicit attention to language learning activities and to the formal language
needed to cope with the content presented, so as to achieve the best results both in
receptive and productive skills.
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A major point: using authentic material
One of the major aspects of CBI is the continuous
and massive exposure of the learners to authentic language, and consequently the use of
linguistic material which is not graded or adapted to the students’ levels because it
is not intentionally devised for learning purposes. The advantages of this decision can
easily be seen in that the learners are immediately in touch with real
language, both oral
and written, without any contrived mediation in terms of rhythm, lexical
range, structures, complexity and variety of texts. The disadvantages are in the students’
linguistic inadequacy in managing such materials, especially at beginner
levels.
The key is in the perspective from which we face the
problem, which is not in grading and adapting the material to the level of linguistic
proficiency of the students, which would result in excessive simplification both of the
language and inevitably of the content. The right perspective is in grading and adapting
the activities through which the content is presented, comprehended,
manipulated, processed. The content, not the language, must be at the level of the
students, but never
too simple; otherwise there will be no new learning and the material will appear too banal
and not motivating in the eyes of the students, only an elementary repetition of what is
already known, not challenging or intriguing from the cultural and cognitive point of
views.
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My experience
I have tried and tested this approach myself in my
own classes, from beginners to advanced, for many years in activities such as group or
individual project work, either on topics of particular interest for my students, or
related to their technical/scientific specialisation (mainly electronics) involving the
use of authentic materials from different sources and the creation of a final
communicative product to present the topic (video, lecture, interview, TV/radio programme,
comics, hypertext, Web pages, etc). If the information gap is real, and the tasks you give
the students are stimulating and suitable for them, they succeed in handling almost every
type of authentic material, and one of the reasons lies precisely in the challenge they
represent to them.
From the outset students show immediate enthusiasm
for the novelty introduced by such new procedures and materials, which are never
predictable, always up-to-date and real, even if often they think that comprehension will
be mechanical, just as it seems to be in their mother tongue, so they may feel frustrated
when they realise this is not the case when the code is a foreign language.
The point is to help them to use the right tools
(dictionaries, glossaries etc) and to guide them to use all their cognitive and linguistic
tools to solve all the problems arising from the enigma represented by something that, at
first sight, may seem incomprehensible. Teachers know very well how to do this, since the
task-based activities of presentation (pre-reading/listening/viewing), comprehension and
exploitation (while and post-reading/listening/viewing) of the texts are all present in
the textbooks they use on a day-to-day basis. The only difference in a CBI unit is that it
is up to the teachers and no longer just the textbook writers to develop activities and
tasks related to the materials and suitable for the students, both from the linguistic and
the learning point of view.
To put it briefly, we could say that both teachers
and learners become the protagonists of their respective teaching and learning processes.
The teachers acquire awareness of the reasons for every step of the lesson and at the same
time can express their professional skills and creativity and fulfil a variety of
different roles: presenter, activity developer, co-ordinator, manager, guide, even learner
when the content is not familiar.
The learners acquire awareness of the processes they
are going through from the very beginning, especially if they are involved in the choice
of the themes to develop and in the search for material – eg a guided search on the
Internet, e-mails written to organisations, companies, e-pals, the choice of articles from
magazines and newspapers, chapters/passages from textbooks or encyclopaedias coming from
native speakers’ countries, the choice of passages from literary texts, could all be
very rich sources of information and fruitful experiences from which to acquire the
capacity of skimming and discriminating according to their specific target
themes. They
become aware of the path they have to follow in order to master the material and interact
with the texts presented in the creation of personal study materials (notes,
schemes,
semantic areas, classifications, graphic representations, summaries, files of different
sources etc), up to the end, in the follow-up activities, in which they become presenters
themselves of the final communicative products they have decided to
make, and
assessors of the work of other students, provided that a grid of evaluation parameters and
level descriptors has been devised beforehand.
Such experiences imply the development of all the
skills, both receptive and productive, and the improvement of strategies belonging to all
the components of the process: linguistic, cognitive, metacognitive,
affective. Co-operation, mediation, negotiation in the small groups, in the class, between students
and teacher, between school and outside world, become fundamental and necessary strategies
to carry out the shared plan and realise the products.
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The competence
of the language teacher in CBI units
"Who will teach the course, a language teacher,
a content specialist, or both?" (S B Stryker, B L Leaver op cit p 7).
"In order for CBI to work effectively and for
students to be able to learn new subject matter while learning the language, the
instructors must be more than just good language teachers. They must be knowledgeable in
the subject matter and know how to elicit knowledge from their students. This combination
of skills is not often found in a single language instructor. A team-teaching approach
offers definite advantages." (S B Stryker, B L Leaver, ibid p. 292).
The right solution seems to lie in co-operation
between the subject matter teacher and the teacher of English, where the former plays the
role of the expert in the thematic field with the primary objective of improving the
students’ knowledge related to the subject, and the latter plays the role of the
expert in the communication strategies with the primary objective of developing the
students’ communicative (mainly strategic) competence. In the Italian school
environment, especially at the high school level, this may be much easier to say than to
do, individualism being a major trait of our teaching style. In addition it has to be said
that, even in the latest innovations introduced in our national education system, in spite
of the endless number of times words like multidisciplinary,
interdisciplinary,
cross-curricular objectives, co-operative work, co-presence, co-operation, etc. are
repeated in laws and ministerial circulars , it does not seem clearly defined when and
where this should occur exactly; perhaps because this would imply a fundamental change in
the way teachers work in Italian high schools, including their working hours, pre-service
and in-service training, possible external control of their results etc.
However, co-operative work is the basic feature of
content-based English teaching and the form of the thematic modules introduced in the
ordinary curriculum of both English language and the subject involved is the best (or the
most realistic) way to start without excessively upsetting the status quo, which
might result in the impossibility of managing the inevitable bureaucratic and
organisational problems (school timetable, use of laboratories, necessary
materials,
possible funding etc).
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Conclusion: my
(very) modest proposal for
experimenting with CBI in my school. Three thematic modules (English +
Electronics) to be
realised in the second part of this school year in three of my classes (classes 3A, 4A,
5A), in collaboration with the teacher of Electronics.
I have had this idea for some years,
but, before
last summer, it was based exclusively on my preceding experiences (units realised in my
classes and a book written some years ago with a colleague of mine, containing
interdisciplinary units for the last year of Middle School in preparation of the
exam) and
on some interesting lectures I attended during various TESOL and British Council meetings
in which some teachers, especially from vocational schools, reported their experiences of
real interdisciplinary teaching unit realised in their classes (English +
mathematics,
English + Information Technology, English + Health Education, etc.). I have always been
rather "timid" in proposing such experiences to my colleagues as something to
build an entire curriculum on, or even parts of it. Now I realise that I tended to
consider such experiences as something to be added from time to time and not
inserted
and adjusted inside the curricula, so experimenting their effectiveness instead of
activities and techniques I knew were not so effective to the students. In my last
experience (Norwich) I have found the rationale I lacked (importance of the metacognitive
and affective component in the learning-teaching process, Action Research, multiple role
of the teacher) and the awareness that any type of innovations, such as New
Technologies,
teaching modules, new approaches, activities and techniques created by the
teachers, etc.,
have to become part of the curriculum and experimented according to a precise plan
that,
starting from the analysis of the situation, includes in details all the steps to follow
in a logic sequence, with the teacher ready to change direction (flexibility) whenever the
feedback from the students suggests this, up to the end, when an overall evaluation of the
process is needed, so that the innovation can be judged according to the results it has
produced. In a word, paraphrasing Chomsky, teaching is creativity governed by
rules,
otherwise it becomes improvisation connected to the wrong idea that creativity is simply
intuition, spontaneity and immediacy.
General features of the three modules
Length: 15 hours (1 hour per week) 15 hours (1 hour per
week)
Teachers’ pre-requisites: co-presence of
English and Electronics. The English teacher is familiar with the content; the Electronics
teacher can understand English.
Students’ pre-requisites: students’
mastery of the basic classroom language to use in exchanges with teachers and in
groupwork.
Language : English will be the language used
during the modules. Italian may be used only occasionally by the Electronics teacher (who
cannot speak English very well) if anything said during the lessons concerning content
needs to be corrected. The students will have a general knowledge of the content
(previously introduced in Italian by the Electronics teacher in order both to give the
students a base on which they can build up new knowledge, and to make easier their task of
handling authentic material), but most of the information they will find in the
texts/materials presented will be new to them. The new linguistic structures found in the
texts and considered indispensable for the comprehension and the production phases, will
be the subject of the other English lessons during the week. English will be the language used
during the modules. Italian may be used only occasionally by the Electronics teacher
(who
cannot speak English very well) if anything said during the lessons concerning content
needs to be corrected. The students will have a general knowledge of the content
(previously introduced in Italian by the Electronics teacher in order both to give the
students a base on which they can build up new knowledge, and to make easier their task of
handling authentic material), but most of the information they will find in the
texts/materials presented will be new to them. The new linguistic structures found in the
texts and considered indispensable for the comprehension and the production
phases, will
be the subject of the other English lessons during the week.
Content: "What is a system?" (class
3A) "What is a system?" (class
3A)
"Operational amplifiers" (Class 4A)
"A/D, D/A converters" (class 5A)
OBJECTIVES
English: :
- ability to use English as a means of real
communication in the school context for study activities
- capacity to analyse and comprehend texts containing
descriptions of phenomena, devices and processes
- acquisition of specific lexis related both to the
theme and to the type of communicative product the students decide to make
- mastery of the linguistic structures necessary to
handle the content
- oral production: being able to produce a mini-lecture
or another form of oral communication (interview, TV/radio programme etc) with the help of
materials produced for the presentation (posters, slides, video, audio recordings etc)
- written production: being able to make a report on
the theme through a short essay, scientific article, laboratory report, tutorial addressed
to younger students etc.
Electronics:
- acquisition of new knowledge by using a verbal code
different from the mother tongue
- development of the capacity for problem-solving by
using a foreign language
- acquisition of specific lexis, necessary to deal with
the theme
Shared objectives:
- awareness of the function of the verbal language as a
means for communicating content and acquiring new knowledge
- capacity to organise one’s own autonomous study
by determining effective personal learning paths and building written or graphic documents
for subsequent personal study or new elaboration in the final work to be produced
- capacity to search for information concerning the
target theme, analysing the different texts/materials found, and detecting the recurrent
features from the point of view of the data provided, the linguistic and the textual
structures
- capacity to discriminate, classify and organise
relevant information after establishing similarities and differences between different
sources
- capacity to process the topic autonomously in oral
and/or written production having specific communicative characteristics (target users,
style, context etc.)
- capacity to use the information and the procedures
learned during this module in future analogous situations, even if dealt with in the
students’ mother tongue
- capacity to co-operate (students-teacher,
student-student) for a shared purpose.
Materials:
The texts, both written and oral, will be authentic
materials (on-line documents from commercial and educational sites, monolingual
dictionaries and glossaries, textbooks from English or American schools,
encyclopaedias, newspapers, magazines, educational videos, audio recordings
etc) selected according to the
students’ levels of knowledge with respect to both content and language.
Methodology:
The students will play an active role during the
lessons in individual and group activities of the following types:
- preparation/material presentation
(brainstorming,
making hypotheses on the possible content of texts by observing graphic elements such as
graphs, pictures, headlines, features of layout and typography, introductory parts etc)
with the double purpose of creating expectation and motivation to continue reading/
viewing/listening and of reconstructing their previous knowledge about the content and the
language necessary to express it (brainstorming,
making hypotheses on the possible content of texts by observing graphic elements such as
graphs, pictures, headlines, features of layout and typography, introductory parts
etc)
with the double purpose of creating expectation and motivation to continue
reading/ viewing/listening and of reconstructing their previous knowledge about the content and the
language necessary to express it
- analysis/comprehension
(main theme, meaning
nuclei, specific information, keywords, definitions of technical terms etc) (main
theme, meaning
nuclei, specific information, keywords, definitions of technical terms
etc)
- processing/expansion/production/final presentation
(oral
and written) in small groups. (oral
and written) in small groups.
The tasks will have as their main aim student
interaction, with one another, with the teachers, with the texts/materials.
In addition, each module will comprise a phase of
self-access learning, in the afternoon, in the multimedia lab or in the school library,
during which the students will complete their activities autonomously according to the
task they have to fulfil.
Testing and assessment:
Testing and assessment will have the double purpose
of measuring both the level of language learning and mastery of content.
At the end of the presentation of the basic
materials, the students will be given a short test (multiple choice, true/false, matching,
completion), the purpose of which will be essentially formative, in order to evaluate the
amount of information they have retained, and consequently the suitability and
effectiveness of the materials and the related activities.
At the end of the module the final products realised
in small groups by the students will be assessed both by the Electronics and English
teachers according to a list of parameters and descriptors of a level specifically devised
according to the type of communication the groups choose (mini-lecture, interview,
educational programme, paper, scientific article, hypertext, Web pages etc).
In addition, a final test, in the form of a written
questionnaire, will be prepared in Italian by the Electronics teacher, either to avoid
unfavourable marks in Electronics for the students who are good at the subject, but not so
good at English, or to evaluate the validity of the initial hypothesis, that is whether
the students can acquire new knowledge in a subject by using a foreign language, so
obtaining the double result of learning new things and developing their linguistic and
communicative competence.
The capacity to co-operate in order to realise a
common objective will be assessed by observing the communicative interaction among the
students and between students and teachers. A form will be used on which the teachers will
take systematic notes on the behaviour of the students (especially during groupwork) and
on the results of the self-access learning sessions as far as deadlines and task
fulfilment are concerned.
Schedule of modules:
Phase 1 (plenary)
2 hours (+ 1 extra hour of English or Electronics
for the test)
- presentation of some basic materials (1 written
introductory text and 1 oral presentation – interview with a native speaker
expert,
video tutorial, English teacher’s mini-lecture) guided by task-based activities
- test on the materials presented
Phase 2
1 hour (group work) + afternoon self-access learning
activities
search for and choice of other materials according
to directions indicated by the teachers and the sources provided (Website addresses,
CD-ROMs, textbooks, dictionaries, scientific magazines, data-sheets, manuals etc)
Phase 3
3 hours (individual and group work) + afternoon
self-access learning activities
- analysis and comprehension of the materials chosen
- production of schemes, maps, and semantic areas
related to the texts
Phase 4
2 hours (in groups)
Oral presentations of relevant information found in
the materials analysed by the different groups, presenting the study materials produced
(schemes, maps, graphic representations, layouts, semantic areas etc)
Phase 5
1 hour (plenary)
overall map construction containing all the relevant
information and data found, and all the different fields covered by the groups
Phase 6
4 hours (group work) + afternoon self-access
learning activities
realisation of an original communicative product
which can convey the information about the theme studied to a given target population
according to the characteristics observed in the type of communication chosen
Phase 7
2 hours (in groups)
presentation of final products
Bibliography
Marguerite Ann Snow, Donna M Brinton, Content-Based
Classroom, Longman, New York 1997Marguerite Ann
Snow, Donna M Brinton, Content-Based
Classroom, Longman, New York 1997
H. G. Widdowson, Teaching Language as
Communication, OUP, 1978
D M Brinton, M A Snow, M Bingham Wesche, Content
-Based Second Language Acquisition, Newbury House, New York 1989
D. Little, S. Devitt, D. Singleton, Learning
Foreign Languages from Authentic Texts: Theory and Practice, Authentik in association
with CILT, Dublin 1989
John Greenwood, "The role of English in
interdisciplinary teaching", Creativity in Language Teaching, The British
Council 1988, Milan Conference
S B Stryker, B L Leaver, Content-Based
Instruction in Foreign Language Education, Georgetown University Press, Washington
1997
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