Moving Beyond the Grammatical Syllabus

Practical Strategies for Content-Based Curriculum Design

Jason Martel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000514018
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In this concise and practical book, Martel advocates for a content-based approach to foreign language curriculum design that emphasizes communicative competence, cognitive engagement, and social justice. Intended primarily for busy teachers with limited preparation time, the book includes:

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• An introduction to content-based instruction and its use to date in foreign language education

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• Step-by-step strategies for designing content-based unit plans, lesson plans, and assessments

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• A complete curricular unit that serves as a guiding example, including nine lesson plans and a summative assessment

The book is accompanied by a website that will feature additional examples of content-based curricular materials across a range of languages and proficiency levels, available at http://cbi.middcreate.net/movingbeyond.

1CBI and Foreign Language Education

DOI: 10.4324/9781003017424-2

In this chapter, I commence our exploration of CBI with important background information. First, I define CBI. Then, I explain how it has been implemented to date in foreign language education. Next, I make the core argument of this book: that we should adopt what is called a content-driven (Met, 1998) approach to CBI in foreign language education. Finally, I discuss what planning for a content-driven approach to CBI means for our identities as foreign language teachers.

1.1 Definitions of CBI

CBI is defined as “a curricular and instructional approach in which nonlinguistic content is taught to students through the medium of a language that they are learning as a second, heritage, indigenous, or foreign language” (Tedick & Cammarata, 2012, p. S28). There’s a lot to unpack in this definition. First, CBI is identified as a curricular approach, which is understood to represent “a vision of what education should be and the role it should play” (Tedick & Cammarata, 2010, p. 244). Second, content is qualified as “nonlinguistic,” which includes information, concepts, or ideas from other school subject areas such as biology or cultural studies (Lyster, 2011), as well as “any topic, theme or non-language issue of interest or importance to…learners” (Genesee, 1994, p. 3). In this conceptualization, content does not include metalinguistic information about grammar structures. Finally, it is indicated that instruction in CBI classrooms should occur primarily in the additional (i.e., target) language.

A crucial element of CBI’s effectiveness is “the concurrent and balanced teaching of both language and content” (Cammarata, Tedick, & Osborn, 2016, p. 12, emphasis in original; see also Lyster, 2017). The synergistic relationship between language and content is referred to in the CBI literature as counterbalance (Lyster, 2007). In counterbalanced instruction, “language and content can be conceptualized as complementary options in a dynamic relation that optimizes L2 learning” (Tedick & Lyster, 2020, p. 81). In other words, language and content should both receive attention in the curriculum, continually propelling and never stifling each other. Furthermore, counterbalanced instruction includes both reactive and proactive elements (Tedick & Lyster, 2020). Responding to a student’s oral language error with a recast represents an example of reactive counterbalance, whereas selecting a specific language focus “designed intentionally to highlight connections between subject-matter content and the language needed to engage with that content” (Tedick & Lyster, 2020, p. 82) represents an example of proactive counterbalance. Reactive counterbalance is primarily an instructional concern (i.e., enacted during class), whereas proactive counterbalance is primarily a planning concern (i.e., planned for before class). This book addresses the latter.

CBI is practiced in a broad range of contexts and “differs in terms of factors such as educational setting, program objectives, and target population” (Snow, 2014, p. 439). In an effort to classify the different types of content-based foreign language programs, Tedick and Cammarata (2012) designed a matrix featuring two key variables: time and curricular focus. The time continuum of the matrix includes high and low time-intensive poles, while the curricular focus continuum includes content- and language-driven poles. To give an example, early total immersion programs¹ are considered to be high time-intensive and content-driven, as students spend a significant amount of time during the school day operating in the target language, and subject-area content (e.g., math, social studies) is the driving curricular force. In contrast, foreign language programs (e.g., French I in a high school or second semester German in a college) are considered to be low time-intensive and language-driven, as students spend only a small portion of the school day in language courses, and language is typically the driving force for curriculum design.

1.2 CBI in Foreign Language Education

This book focuses on CBI implementation in low time-intensive and language-driven foreign language education programs, a context I refer to henceforth as “foreign language education.” I chose this focus because CBI has not yet enjoyed widespread adoption in foreign language education, despite reported interest starting in the early 1980s. Dupuy’s (2000) literature review on CBI includes several studies between 1981 and 1997 under the rubric of “theme-based studies” that were carried out in foreign language courses. These studies, all of which were conducted at the tertiary level, revealed continued positive findings in the domains of language competence, subject matter learning, and self-confidence/motivation. To give two examples, Lafayette and Buscaglia (1985) found that students in an intermediate- level French course who were exposed to CBI felt more positive about the lessons they received and were more interested in continuing their French studies than students who received a traditional skills-based curriculum. Klee and Tedick (1997) found that students in an intermediate-level content-based Spanish course made significant gains on multiple measures of language learning, including a cloze task, an elicited imitation task, and vocabulary and writing tests. More recent studies of CBI at the university level (e.g., Rodgers, 2006) have also yielded positive results from a language learning perspective.

There are far fewer studies that document CBI implementation at the middle and high school levels. Those that exist revealed positive findings concerning language learning, subject matter learning, and self-confidence/motivation, like the higher education studies mentioned above. At the high school level, Cumming and Lyster (2016) studied the implementation of a content-based unit on environmental issues in a French III course. They found that students made gains in grammatical gender accuracy on immediate and delayed post-tests. At the middle school level, Pessoa et al. (2007) studied the implementation of CBI in two sixth grade Spanish classrooms. Importantly, they demonstrated that different conceptualizations of CBI can influence student learning outcomes. To elaborate, one of the teachers in the study, James, focused primarily on language form while implementing CBI, whereas the other teacher, Grace, asked her students to expand on their opinions related to content. Perhaps surprisingly, Grace’s students outperformed James’ in multiple language domains (e.g., vocabulary, language control) on a writing assessment, even though James more frequently focused on form during his teaching. The study’s authors posited that this interesting finding may be related to discursive factors: that Grace “routinely negotiated form with her students, while James’ approach to accuracy relied heavily on the direct provision of the correct form by the teacher embedded in evaluative feedback sequences” (p. 114).

Given the positive outcomes reported in these studies, it is curious to me that CBI has not become more widespread in foreign language education. I suspect this is largely due to the hegemony of language-driven commercial textbooks, which is closely associated with the limited time teachers generally have during their workdays to focus on curriculum design.

1.3 A Rationale for CBI in Foreign Language Education

Many scholars have outlined research- and theory-based rationales for implementing CBI across a range of foreign/second language contexts, including Byrnes (2005), Cammarata et al. (2016), Donato (2016), Dupuy (2000), Fitzsimmons-Doolan, Grabe, and Stoller (2017), Jourdenais and Shaw (2005), Lain (2016), Stryker and Leaver (1997), Met (1991, 1998), Tedick and Cammarata (2010, 2012), and Tedick and Wesely (2015). In this section, I build on these publications by highlighting four reasons why I consider it advantageous to foster widespread adoption of CBI in foreign language education.

First, CBI helps facilitate the development of communicative competence. According to Lyster (2007), CBI provides “the requisite motivational basis for purposeful communication” (p. 2). Planning for CBI implicates all three of the ACTFL’s Communication Standards: interpersonal communication, interpretive communication, and presentational communication (National Standards Collaborative Board, 2015). The three modes of communication represent students’ ability to:

• interact and negotiate meaning in spoken, signed, or written conversations to share information, reactions, feelings, and opinions (interpersonal communication);
• understand, interpret, and analyze what is heard, read, or viewed on a variety of topics (interpretive communication); and
• present information, concepts, and ideas to inform, explain, persuade, and narrate on a variety of topics using appropriate media and adapting to various audiences of listeners, readers, or viewers (presentational communication; National Standards Collaborative Board, 2015, paras. 2–4).

These modes of communication are vital to CBI because they help students access information and ideas in texts and then discuss and share what they learned with others. It is well understood that in foreign language education, communication hasn’t always been front and center. Foreign language teachers have historically spent too much time focusing on analyzing language structures at the expense of cultivating students’ ability to use structures to communicate meaningfully and authentically with others (Cammarata et al.,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 CBI and Foreign Language Education
• 2 Conceptualizing Content in Unit Planning
• 3 Balancing Language and Content in Unit Planning
• 4 Balancing Language and Content in Lesson Planning
• Conclusion
• Appendix A: Thematic Unit Plan Template
• Appendix B: Standards by Subject
• Appendix C: Content Research Planning Guide
• Appendix D: Language Analysis Planning Guide
• Appendix E: Lesson Objectives Planning Guide
• Appendix F: Lesson Plan Template
• Appendix G: Complete Unit Example
• Index