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Date Posted: 09:33:22 10/16/05 Sun
Author: Jefferson Canaverde da Silva
Subject: Final draft: Teaching English through interdisciplinary content

Teaching English through interdisciplinary content

English plays a decisive role in academic courses independently of their field or mother tongue. As far as Brazilian university students are concerned, they have faced remarkable difficulty in comprehending texts and building up their own English vocabulary, as both are crucial elements for learning English. Learners and teachers must find out possible ways of coping with this problematic situation, which contributes to evasion rate from English classes and a great deal of frustration with the language.


First, it is relevant to mention that Content Based Instruction approach is a highly recommended way of employing interdisciplinary English lessons. CBI is an effective method of combining language and content learning, since it emphasizes learning the target language through a particular content. According to Krahnke, (1987:65) CBI approach stands for “the teaching of content or information in the language being learned with little or no direct or explicit effort to teach the language itself separately from the content being taught.” In other words, students are more likely to receive meaningful input and produce output with much more confidence while working with a subject that they are familiar with. As a result, the amount decoded information is enlarged, internalized and becomes a key factor to reading success.

Besides, interdisciplinary classes are supportive aspect for reading and vocabulary enlargement for academic purposes. The content of classes within this process activates students’ background due to their previous exposure to the subject in other disciplines. In addition, Jacobs declares interdisciplinary as” a knowledge view and curricular approach that consciously applies methodology and language from more than one discipline to examine a central theme, issue, problem, topic, or experience" (1989, p. 8). If the student’s major is Economics, for instance, English classes must be somehow related to it. This approach triggers student’s capacity of association as well as it links language learning to other subjects across the curriculum. Therefore, a cognitive link is established, misunderstanding avoided and comprehension consolidated.

Additionally, this process brings us other two essential points concerned with CBI and its interdisciplinary application: contextualization and motivation. Students are supposed to read lots of journals, documents and books in English not only related to the English discipline, but also connected to others. However, when they have English as part of the course, it is focused on General English Books or they are provided with lessons that are not associated with their field of study. This situation leads them to feel that some English lessons are not relevant to their needs or they are not able to learn the language. In other words, they fell discouraged to keep up studying English. On the other hand, CBI interdisciplinary English lessons are highly contextualized and motivating due to their relation to a previous exposure to the content in other classes from different areas when English tasks or texts were assigned. According to Jack C. Richards and Theodore S. Rodgers, (2001:207), “CBI better reflects learner’s needs for learning a second language”. Furthermore, learners’ interest is triggered because they consider themselves able to learn English and review some issues discussed in other disciplines as well. Taking inot account motivation, Fielding and Pearson(1994) said that“ Sustained reading of interesting texts improves reading comprehension and enhances enjoyment.” Consequently, learner motivation increases when they are learning about something, rather than just studying language and it is particularly appealing in this respect because teachers can use almost any content inside their course program that they feel their students will enjoy and at the same time discourage dropouts.



To sum up, the point here is not to criticize or abandon the use of different sorts of material or General English lessons during the classes. On the contrary, it has to do with taking advantage of content of other disciplines in English classes and present or review it focusing the Study of English language. It is known that schools and books are great sources of vocabulary, knowledge and, undoubtedly, responsible for enormous part of our vocabulary which is likely to be used for the rest of our lives. Consequently, it is fundamental to conciliate those sources of authentic knowledge to the implementation of CBI cross curriculum English classes for academic purpose in order to improve reading ability and expand student’s vocabulary.


Bibliography:

Fielding, L. and Pearson, D. 1994. Reading comprehension: What works. Educational Leadership 62-68

Jacobs, H. H. 1989.Interdisciplinary Curriculum: Design and Implementation. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development,.


Krahnke, K.1987.Approaches to Syllabus Design for Foreign Language Teaching. New York: Prentice Hall.

Jack C. Richards and Theodore S. Rodgers, 2001. Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching. University of Cambridge Press.

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