Understanding and implementing content-based instruction: An exploration of foreign language teachers' lived experience.

摘要

Content-based instruction (CBI), an innovative curricular approach to foreign language instruction that describes the use of a foreign language to teach any non-language subjects, has been touted as a key curricular approach in second/foreign language education, and research has shown it to be quite effective in a wide range of language settings. Yet this approach, whose guiding principles are in harmony with the latest research and theorizing in education and cognitive psychology as well as in second language acquisition, remains very rarely implemented and often overtly criticized for setting idealistic goals.; There are a variety of problems linked to the integration of CBI in existing foreign language curricula cited in the literature, but they can only partly account for CBI's lack of popularity in both national and international foreign language educational spheres. Little is really known about how teachers experience CBI, that is, how they experience the learning of the approach as they attempt to weave it into their own instructional practice.; In order to gain a deeper understanding of the many factors that might influence the implementation of CBI, this phenomenological study proposed to explore the learning experiences of four practicing foreign language teachers working in formal/mainstream instructional environments, representing middle, high school, and post-secondary contexts. The four study participants were enrolled in a year-long professional development program geared toward helping them learn and possibly implement CBI.; The findings of the study reveal that learning CBI for foreign language teachers in traditional instructional settings is an experience which engages teachers in a continuous struggle to explore, rearrange, and sometimes reformat their preconceived notions about language teaching and learning. As the findings suggest, learning CBI is an experience whose complexity goes well beyond what has been portrayed in the recent research literature: it calls for the exploration of one's own teaching identity and challenges one's vision of what teaching and learning foreign languages ought to be. The findings also reveal the need for professional development programs to create safe environments that could allow teachers to explore, reflect, and experiment freely.