Reflection 8

Balancing Content and Language in Instruction:

 The Experience of Immersion Teachers

By DIANNE J. TEDICK

To date, I hadn’t explored any research related to teachers’ actual experience of attempting to attend to both content and language in instruction. Unquestionably, Content-Based Instruction (CBI) whose primary mission involves balancing language and content in instruction is extremely complicated and difficult for teachers to put into practice. Teachers, particularly, immersion teachers, face challenges to the successful implementation of CBI where language acquisition suffers more. During our class discussions, I learned that there are two types of immersion programs: one-way where the majority of learners speak in the same L1, and two-way where half of the learners speak, for example, in English, and the other half speaks in French, as in Canada. Another categorization of immersion programs that we discussed is between Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BICS) and Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP). BICS, which lasts 1-2 years, aims to develop learners’ conversational fluency in everyday topics and is more contextualized; while CALP, whose duration is 3-5 years, is targeted at the development of academic skills, is decontextualized, highly abstract, and relies on the knowledge of language.

Providing a good quality immersion education is rather challenging. We need to understand the problems to be able to give them solutions. Thus, this reflective lifeworld research approach helped me identify the problems from the perspective of those, in this case immersion teachers, who had lived them, and the meaning – what it means to live this particular experience. The issues highlighted by them were: identity issues, external challenges issues, isolation issues, ongoing difficulty identifying what language to focus on in the context of content instruction, and increased awareness of the interdependence of content and language.

Based on our class discussion, there are 5 main principles to overcome these challenges: identifying and connecting language and content objectives, activating students’ prior knowledge, providing comprehensible input, enabling language production, and assessing language and content objectives. To further on, it’s also necessary to reinforce immersion teachers’ view of themselves not only as content teachers but also as language teachers. This can be done through teacher education programs. Also, good textbooks that balance language and content should be published. Certain materials might help teachers prepare to implement the CBI successfully. They should focus on strategies to help teachers to find the language, know when and how to focus in on it during instruction, and how to follow-up on it in assessment. This will also help teachers in understanding how to provide explicit instruction within the context of meaning-based instruction when students are developmentally ready for it.