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Article Excerpt
Abstract
Besides teaching language skills, the community college ESL curriculum must also prepare students for further academic studies. Content-Based ESL is a methodology which teaches academic vocabulary, domain knowledge, and critical thinking in an ESL context. When students do not have sufficient reading skill to achieve the objectives of this curriculum, it can be supplemented with relevant young adult fiction. The combination of Content-Based Instruction and children's literature, written for an adolescent audience, is an effective strategy for improving the academic skills of adult ESL students.
Introduction
Sometimes there is a gap between the goals which have been established for our students and their ability to meet the demands of these goals. In these situations, we must look for creative solutions to accomplish our curricular objectives. A current methodology for academic ESL, Content-Based Instruction (henceforth CBI), is considered a very effective curriculum to promote authentic and meaningful use of language, develop critical thinking skills, and prepare ESL students to participate in college level studies. However, in spite of the promise of CBI, students who have poor reading skills, weak vocabularies, and inadequate background knowledge may find it difficult to participate in the activities of CBI and may not be able to experience CBI as an opportunity for learning and thinking. When ESL students do not have welldeveloped academic and linguistic skills, literature is an excellent way to bridge the language/knowledge gap. Literature that is related to the content topic and is easily readable can provide essential facts, ideas, and vocabulary. With the information they get from the literary work, students can acquire necessary factual and language background, making it possible to competently read and understand the materials included in the content topic. A curriculum which combines accessible literature with CBI helps students with poor reading and language skills to become active participants in the important linguistic and cognitive activities of CBI.
A particularly successful strategy has been the use of children's literature, specifically young adult historical fiction, to supplement an ESL content unit on history. When adult ESL students read novels written for adolescents, they are able to acquire academic vocabulary and important domain knowledge. Moreover, this curriculum, which includes carefully chosen examples of authentic, well-written young adult literature, can facilitate the development of reading skill, critical thinking, and a high level of communicative interaction. This discussion will present a summary of the arguments for incorporating CBI into the ESL curriculum, an analysis the academic deficiencies that make it difficult for certain students to achieve the objectives of CBI, and a description of a specific innovation, the use of young adult literature, which was developed to overcome these problems.
ESL and Academic Objectives
The traditional objectives of ESL--reading, writing, listening, and speaking--have been transformed by changes in the community colleges and the aspirations of the student body. The current population of students needs considerably more than the ability to speak and understand English. They now need the skills to pass various exit exams, qualify for certification or career programs, or continue their academic study. To help students to achieve these goals, ESL methodology has expanded from the domain of language instruction to a multi-faceted discipline which incorporates language, academic skills, critical thinking, and other activities designed to prepare students to participate successfully in college content classes. This new ESL is frequently referred to as academic ESL.
However, academic ESL is still ESL, and any kind of curriculum modification would be ill-considered if it did not incorporate past insights about what contributes to effective language teaching. Krashen (1982, 1985) exemplifies the attitude of many educators, claiming that the best language instruction results from situations in which authentic communication is possible. Methodologies which allow for ESL instruction in a communicative environment have been developed around many different models, such as cooperative learning and task-based, theme-based, and content-based instruction (Richards & Rodgers, 2001; Brinton, Snow, & Wesehe, 1989). For each of these models, it is possible to construct an ESL lesson in a variety of ways, as it can focus upon grammatical acquisition, problem solving, literature, a content subject, or various combinations of these methods. It is wonderful that ESL lends itself to such a wide range of possibilities for building curriculum, but, nevertheless, it can still be difficult to find the most appropriate methodology for a particular situation and even more challenging to put together an effective curriculum for the demands of academic ESL
Content-Based Instruction in ESL
The overriding consideration in selecting a teaching methodology must inevitably be the educational objectives for that particular situation (Celcia-Murcia & McIntosh, 1979). CBI is a methodology which stimulates a high level of communicative interaction and also meets many of the important objectives of academic ESL, which are to teach English and, at the same time, to impart the kinds of linguistic, critical thinking, and study skills that are necessary for a successful college experience. CBI includes the traditional ESL objectives of reading, writing, listening, speaking, critical thinking, grammar practice, and vocabulary acquisition, but in this methodology, language instruction is organized around content themes, topics selected from various academic disciplines. The topics for the content unit can be drawn from almost any subject area, including the social and natural sciences, cultural themes, or historical events. The information for the content can be derived from various kinds of materials, such as textbooks, novels, newspaper articles, the interact, lectures, movies, photographs, poems, etc. We might best describe this methodology by saying that ESL is contextualized within...
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