On Friday, I attended Roy Lyster’s talk on Proactive and reactive approaches to integrated language & content. 

I was really impressed by his clarity in presenting ideas, the extent of his experience and research, as well as the wealth of information he’s gathered from his work. I particularly enjoyed his explanation of the proactive model to curriculum design. Here is what I took away from this discussion:

Immersion does not harm L1, it can actually enhance it. However, immersion students still had trouble with grammatical accuracy, lexical language, & sociolinguistic appropriateness.

These difficulties arose for immersion students’ because their input, from teachers, was limited in tense, aspect and other elements of language that native speakers are exposed to.

Roy’s research, and others’, shows that language can be learned by bypassing grammar and focusing on communicative competence (which is what happens in CBI courses and immersion programs sometimes). However, a direct and contextualized focus on grammar can help solve the non-native issues may immersion and language learners face.

CBI contextualizes language in content and builds pathways to language that are strongly associated with topics. To do this teachers should design their course (or cross disciplinary courses) so that the focus on content bookends the focus on language and grammar learning.

Roy’s proactive approach sequence:

noticing (language during content)

awareness (metalinguistic reflection,  noticing patterns)

guided practice (Ss use new grammar/lexical/language in meaningful content driven tasks)

Autonomous practice (a return to content information where Ss are expected to use the newly learned language skills as well)

I think this system is very useful for designing a curriculum because it can be used at the syllabus stage, the unit stage, the lesson plan stage, or even at the individual task stage. I think this approach would be very useful to use in the language classroom that has a focus on other areas of the culture (environmentalism, holidays etc.)