Kathy’s Reflection on Dr. Roy Lyster’s Talk

Dr. Lyster’s talk profoundly resonated with me because content-based instruction (CBI) is the teaching strategy/method that has intrigued me for a long time. I still remember the first time I heard about CBI was last summer when I was just accepted into the TFL program and decided to stay in Monterey to observe the Chinese classes in Summer Intensive Language Program. After started the first semester in last fall, Peter introduced this concept in his Principle and Practices class and displayed several videos using CBI. Then I was participating in Professor Dai’s Chinese classes, in which she involved ancient Chinese classics, such as The Art of War, Tao Te Ching, and modern Western business management ideologies into her language curriculum for the advanced learners. My most recent exposure to CBI should be the field trip of classroom observation to the Chinese-American International School in San Francisco.

Reflect upon all the above-mentioned cases, I regard them as great models for conducting CBI in general but I do have concerns over each specific example. In the first case of SILP Chinese class, the learners were at intermediate to high levels taking four-hour classes every day with an experienced Chinese instructor from Harvest Chinese language and culture studies department. The textbooks they used for SILP classes were composed of authentic materials that are newspaper reports selected from mainstream Chinese media. So the daily class routine would be vocabulary review and dictation, text explanations and class discussions about lesson related topics. The language was introduced to students through content including social life, politics, and ethics, though; the materials themselves were kind of outdated and not applicable to the target cultural society anymore.

One CBI clip Peter showed to us was a biology teacher conducting healthy diet and fast food lesson in Spanish. I was deeply impressed by the success of Spanish teaching in that class because the teacher not only chose the right topic in a sense that everybody felt familiar to it and could have something to contribute to class discussion, but also he chose the menu of McDonald’s in Spanish with calorie indicated beside every food item – math was introduced to class at the same time.

As innovative as Professor Dai always is, I was still fascinated by her creativity in teaching ancient Chinese based on CBI principles. The reason is even though the learners are highly advanced in this language, ancient Chinese could still be a huge challenge for them. However, Professor Dai successfully intrigued learners’ interests in ancient Chinese language and culture by assimilating the prominence view in cognitive linguistics into her CBI classes. More specifically, she never requests students to memorize any quotes from classic books but pay close attention to idioms derived from them that learners can still use in daily life. Her balanced approach to teaching content and language at the same time serves as a great example for Chinese teachers who are also struggling with teaching ancient Chinese. Nevertheless, it is unavoidable that that single class couldn’t really cater to interests and academic background of each student since they all came from different programs at MIIS. Thus, I’m eager to explore a more comprehensive way of choose materials for CBI classes.

The last and also most recent personal experience in CBI is about the Chinese-American International School (CAIS). This is an immersion school, which has a whole education system starting from kindergarten to 12th grade providing bilingual classes in both English and another foreign language, so Chinese is one of them. I regard their classes as completely CBI-oriented because the daily schedule for students is to learn different subjects in English in the morning and take the same classes conducted in Chinese in the afternoon or vice versa. This way of teaching applies to learners in all grades starting in kindergarten and ends at middle school level. Since this is a wholly indigenous education system, I wonder how feasible it could be when being implemented outside of this school.

In summary, Dr. Lyster’s talk greatly inspired me to reflect on the concept of CBI and my related experience. It’s high time took a closer and more linguistically-practical view on CBI.

Andrew’s reflection:

It’s always nice to see parts of our classroom experience come alive with a guest speaker.  I found Roy Lyster’s speech to be quite interesting, and I hope we have more opportunities to engage in similar activities in the future.  Hearing about the ways in which content and language have been integrated in the Canadian model was fascinating- and I’d like to learn more about similar models across the globe.

I was particularly taken with Roy Lyster’ comment that the ‘benefits don’t come for free’.  CBI is a part of the process, but there seems to be a distinct need for planning and incorporating language teaching aspects as well.

I particularly liked the inclusion of what Dr. Lyster called ‘noticing activities’.  The moonwalking bear was an excellent (and fun) example of the need for such tasks when engaging with language.  I can see where this sort of activity would be particularly important in mitigating some of the reduced grammatical accuracy that seems to come from these sorts of immersive, content/language integrated programs.

One other particularly useful aspect introduced in Dr. Lyster’s talk was an autonomous practice stage.  The more I consider the options opened up by this sort of scaffolding, the more I really like it.  Giving students the tools to approach language and content on their own terms- and then letting them form and elucidate their own opinions- strikes me as highly effective.

There is one aspect, however, that I’m a bit skeptical of.  I’ve encountered these sorts of programs in contexts where there is little L2 engagement in the L1 culture.  Specifically, many schools in China are taking an integrated approach to teaching- but since there is no level of English interaction outside of school, student proficiency (again, from my observations) seems very low compared to the examples provided by Dr. Lyster.  I see the Canadian models as being exceptional, largely because it involves an extant, symbiotic sociocultural relationship between French & English speakers.  Tremendous efforts have been taken to better integrate French and Anglophone Canadians- and the success of the programs Dr. Lyster pointed to are testament to that fact.  I see his outline of a content integrated approach being most effective in countries where there are extant, long-established multilingual divisions in society and where there have been existing efforts to integrate those communities.  One could imagine these efforts as being a form of language planning- and there must be student support for such efforts to truly succeed.  However, Dr. Lyster’s talk was very interesting, and I’m excited to learn more about content/language integration.

Combined Blog Post

Comments from Andrew:

“I still remember the first time I heard about CBI was last summer when I was just accepted into the TFL program and decided to stay in Monterey to observe the Chinese classes in Summer Intensive Language Program.”

ANDREW: This is so interesting- I hadn’t realized that the SILP program focused so heavily on content-based instruction.  What did you think of the curriculum and its application in the classroom?  Did the students seem to take to this method of instruction, or did they not react as the instructor might have expected?

KATHY’s Response: I think SILP serves as a great boot camp for incoming MIIS students since they will  continue their foreign languages study in the fall semester. I liked the course outline in general; however, the content of the two textbooks used in SILP was adapted from national news agencies that are owned by the Chinese government, which is heavily political orientated and less communicative. Those students seemed to enjoy the teacher’s actual instruction rather than the language content itself，which has nothing to blame as long as the CBI course could achieve its intended purposes.

“The textbooks they used for SILP classes were composed of authentic materials that are newspaper reports selected from mainstream Chinese media.”

ANDREW: I’ve dealt with this sort of thing before, except that the materials were less than authentic.  Some textbook makers have heard the clarion call of authentic materials in second language instruction, but still include materials that use essentially the same graded language.  I know that the Chinese media ministry (I forget the name, but they make China Daily) do produce materials meant for learners of Chinese.

“One CBI clip Peter showed to us was a biology teacher conducting healthy diet and fast food lesson in Spanish.”

ANDREW: I was also impressed with this lesson- and the response of the students.  So, so, so different from my SL learning experiences.

comprehensive way of choose materials for CBI classes.

“The last and also most recent personal experience in CBI is about the Chinese-American International School (CAIS). This is an immersion school, which has a whole education system starting from kindergarten to 12th grade providing bilingual classes in both English and another foreign language, so Chinese is one of them.”

ANDREW: This is almost the reverse version of some of the immersion schools I saw in China (obviously with a focus on English instead of Chinese).  One of the things that I didn’t really agree with Dr. Lyster about was his assertion that CBI and immersion work well in terms of rapid L2 acquisition.  I see so much of the research in this field as stemming from the (highly unique) sociocultural situation in Canada that it makes examples outside of this paradigm difficult to justify.  Canada has made CBI/immersion work because they have to, and because the two populations live and work in close proximity.  There is a history of engagement- which was absent in Chinese based models focused on immersion/CBI and which lacked the high levels of proficiency or language use the Canadian model would seem to predict.    That’s a heck of a reaction, but what was your impression of the level of L2 proficiency for American students learning Chinese under a CBI/immersion model?

KATHY’s Response:

“This is almost the reverse version of some of the immersion schools I saw in China (obviously with a focus on English instead of Chinese).”

Haha, I would probably not agree with you if i haven’t taken the socio-linguistic class this semester – we have talked about the issues of language instruction in immersion schools for heritage speakers in the U.S., and one of them is the dominant  status of English use rather the target language.

Regarding applying CBI model in teaching Mandarin Chinese to L1 English speakers in the States, I can’t agree with you more on the limitations of it -it is inevitable due the huge linguistic gap between characters-based Chinese and letter-based English. The positive transfer of Ss’ first language will seldom happen in learning Chinese compared to learning other Indo-European languages. Therefore, I am still willing to implement CBI in my future classroom, but I would love to wait until my students are mentally and functionally fully prepared for it.