By Josiah Nilsen
Roy Lyster’s presentation really helped me to understand the difference between Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) and Content Based Instruction (CBI). CBI is a good way to teach content, but the students’ language acquisition can suffer as attention is directed solely towards content. CLIL, on the other hand, balances out this deficiency by turning some of the attention back onto language. Thus, the language is used to teach content, but at the same time, content is specifically used to focus on language.
In Content Based Instruction there is a risk that students will fail to be achieve grammatical accuracy, lexical variety, and sociolinguistic appropriateness, despite learning the content well and despite achieving native-like comprehension and high communicative ability. It is possible for students to understand and follow discourse without actually understanding the forms being used. Although such a situation is better than the reverse, where someone knows the forms but cannot communicate or understand, it is still not the ideal situation. As language teachers we should strive to enable our students not only to communicate and understand but also to properly use the right grammatical forms in a sociolinguistically correct way.
Dr. Lyster proposed four practical steps for integrating language and content in a proactive way. In his proposal, a teacher should include a noticing activity, an awareness activity, guided practice, and autonomous practice. It was really cool to see his concrete examples of what these activities could look like in the classroom. I look forward to being able to implement this approach in my teaching.
Part of his talk that also really stood out to me was when he talked about a reactive approach to integrating language and content. He did a great job of highlighting the different kinds of feedback and their relative effectiveness. It’s interesting that although recasts are used as much as all other kinds of feedback combined, they are less effective for most age groups and ability groups. This will be very useful for me as a teacher, and will be one of the things that I will take away from this presentation and remember well.
Another thing he mentioned was to show students the underlying patterns that govern language, and not scare them up front with the exceptions. Arabic has a lot of underlying patterns, which can grow huge families of related words out of a single root. Helping students to understand these patterns is really important, especially in Arabic.
It was very interesting to hear Dr. Lyster’s take on whether foreign language texts should be altered for learner use. Dr. Lyster took the position that altering authentic texts is not only permissible, but often desirable or necessary. In my classes here at MIIS, I have often heard “Change the task, not the text.” This has been so ingrained in me that I have begun to take it for granted. That’s why I didn’t expect to hear a prominent voice in the field take a diametrically opposed view. This is a helpful reminder to me that not all the experts agree, and that the conversation on these issues is ongoing. This is a issue which I need to look into more in order to determine my own position.
I was interested to see the parallel you draw between French and Arabic in terms of generalizable rules and guidelines versus exceptions. I think it’s an important point for a number of languages. As for the reactive part, I would just note that this whole conversation is premised on a teacher-centred classroom. In a situation where most student speech takes place in pair or small group contexts, the development of accuracy and linguistic insights comes from the negotiation of meaning, peer scaffolding and so on (see your SLA course for details). Me, I want teachers to interact with students as naturally as possible and remain focused on communication. Teachers who aim for recasts or prompts can often sound patronizing and inauthentic.
Speaking of authenticity, I have posted myself on the speaker’s views on authentic materials. You are right, there is a conversation to be had (and we shall have it); but for me, it is entirely and unequivocally inadmissible for teachers or curriculum designers to interfere (or doctor) with authentic texts – other than simple moves to scaffold comprehension tasks, such as dividing a text into segments.