From EFL to Content-Based Instruction: what English teachers take with them into the sociolinguistics lecture
Title
From EFL to Content-Based Instruction: what English teachers take with them into the sociolinguistics lecture
From EFL to Content-Based Instruction: what English teachers take with them into the sociolinguistics lecture
Keywords: No Keywords
Authors
Dr. John Adamson
Dr. John Adamson
Abstract
This paper describes the teaching of sociolinguistics to Japanese and Chinese 2nd grade students in a college in Japan by a teacher trained in English as Foreign Language (EFL). It shows how the native speaker EFL teacher employs a methodological combination of teacher transmission and student collaboration as an effective means to teach this particular content-based subject to non-native English speakers using primarily English as the instructional language. This methodological hybrid is argued as being influenced by the teacher’s EFL background towards student input in the lesson, resulting in a syllabus which integrates student beliefs and experiences about the use of language in society and employs multilingual collaboration among students in the lecture itself. This version of traditional lecturing and student interaction, termed here as “collaborative dialogue” (Swain, 2000, p. 97), has succeeded in, firstly, raising the general class level of comprehension and, significantly, lowering anxiety about interaction in class. Additionally, it has resulted in pooling student input about language use to create a rich, contrastive perspective on basic sociolinguistic topics.
This paper describes the teaching of sociolinguistics to Japanese and Chinese 2nd grade students in a college in Japan by a teacher trained in English as Foreign Language (EFL). It shows how the native speaker EFL teacher employs a methodological combination of teacher transmission and student collaboration as an effective means to teach this particular content-based subject to non-native English speakers using primarily English as the instructional language. This methodological hybrid is argued as being influenced by the teacher’s EFL background towards student input in the lesson, resulting in a syllabus which integrates student beliefs and experiences about the use of language in society and employs multilingual collaboration among students in the lecture itself. This version of traditional lecturing and student interaction, termed here as “collaborative dialogue” (Swain, 2000, p. 97), has succeeded in, firstly, raising the general class level of comprehension and, significantly, lowering anxiety about interaction in class. Additionally, it has resulted in pooling student input about language use to create a rich, contrastive perspective on basic sociolinguistic topics.
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Category: Monthly Editions, Volume 10
