Content-Based Instruction in Foreign Language Education

Book excerpt: This book offers concrete and practical ideas for implementing content-based instruction—using subject matter rather than grammar—through eleven case studies of cutting-edge models in a broad variety of languages, academic settings, and levels of proficiency. The highly innovative models illustrate content-based instruction programs for both commonly and less-commonly taught languages—Arabic, Croatian, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Russian, Serbian, and Spanish—and for proficiency levels ranging from beginners to fluent speakers. They include single-teacher and multi-teacher contexts and such settings as typical language department classrooms, specialty schools, intensive language programs, and university programs in foreign languages across the curriculum. All of the contributors are pioneers and practitioners of content-based instruction, and the methods they present are based on actual classroom experiences. Each describes the rationale, curriculum design, materials, and evaluation procedures used in an actual curriculum and discusses the implications of the approach for adult language acquisition.