Developing Learners' Language Awareness and Proficiency in Content-Based Instruction

Dr. Jan Frodesen

Director, English for Multilingual Student Program

Research on content-based instruction (CBI) in language teaching has identified two issues that repeatedly arise regarding its implementation: 1) lack of attention to form and 2) the balancing of attention to form and attention to content (Brinton & Snow, 2017).  This presentation offers first an overview of the principles of content-based instruction and discusses teacher preparation for focusing on language in CBI.  It then demonstrates how language teachers can “mine” oral and written texts for vocabulary and grammatical structures to create noticing and production tasks for learners. Sample texts and tasks are drawn from classwork in English for Academic Purposes; however, the strategies and tasks can be adapted for teaching other languages and used in other instructional contexts.

Reference:  Brinton, D.M. and Snow, M.A. (2017). The evolving architecture of content-based instruction. In M.A. Snow & D.M. Brinton, (Eds.), The content-based classroom: New perspectives on integrating language and content (2nd ed.), (pp. 1-20). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.