Stephen van Vlack

Sookmyung Women`s University

Graduate School of TESOL

English for Specific Purposes (ESP)

Spring 2006

Week 15 - Stryker and Leaver. (1997). Chapter 13, pp. 285-312 - Answers

1. What is the basic rule of thumb when trying to decide on what content will be used for a course?

Content is a large concern for all teachers trying to use content-based teaching. The first aspect of content is the content area or theme. The obvious answer to this question related to themes is to match the content areas to the students needs (as perceived by the teacher) as well as the students interests (as dictated by the students themselves). Keeping this balance between needs and interests is the best rule of thumb when trying to decide on the different themes for the content. In addition to this the teacher also need to decide if she will vary and how much she might vary the themes.

As with other concerns in teaching it is probably important that you arrange your content ion some sort of meaningful order. It has certainly been argued that some content is inherently harder than others. This might be due to a number of factors including abstractness, specificity and the amount of background knowledge needed. The point to remember, and this is especially important to teachers whose content area has to follow the text the have to use, is that you as a teacher set up two ways for the students to deal with content. There are two ends to this. On the one end is the content itself and how long or abstract it is. We can evaluate this the same way we would evaluate (and we should always evaluate) the texts/materials we use. Obviously we want to chose or guide or students to chose content that is not too hard for most of them. Sometimes, however, there is no choice in the content area or even the specific content we have to use in a CBI program and for these occasions there is the other side. This is the side of practice. If the content is hard then we have to se tup practice which is easier. Abstract content will call for concrete practice. Also, if there is one thing that teachers are able to control it is the type of practice their students do. Teachers need to focus on this rather than focusing exclusively on the content. Content is only half the battle. How we deal with it is more important.

Another aspect of content is the medium that will be primarily used, spoken or written form. This is not an issue for most of the researchers we read about in this course but it is something that we need to deal with here because CBI is a method that can easily be adapted to/implemented with younger learners who, in Korea, may not be able to read texts in English yet. Because CBI is generally highly contextualized (the content is or provides an additional kind of the context) it is also a way of developing communicative competence in students who can also read. In the same vein, it provides a good model for developing speaking and listening skills in students in a meaningful way. Even if the focus is not exclusively on speaking content provides real reasons for students to speak as well as topics to speak about.

2.What do Stryker and Leaver believe the CBI teacher should know and be able to do?

According to Stryker and Leaver (1997) teachers should be able to do one of two things, either teach content or be able to cooperate with others and specifically with content teachers. Having reviewed some other more interesting models we know from this course that there are more creative options. We can use videos, computers, L1 content, realia, and many other ways to try to bring content into the classroom. So teachers do not necessarily have to be able to teach content, but they need to be able to find out how to deal with content as well as simply how to find it. As mentioned above the content itself is only half the battle, but it is also true that it is the one thing in CBI that teachers are not used to doing. The sad and true thing is that we are not even very good at dealing with the content of our own field. Language teachers often know little language or linguistic-related content because it is often deemed, paradoxically one might add, too abstract and generally unimportant for good language teaching. Thus, many language teachers have never been exposed to a content-based model during the initial teacher training and are, therefore, quite scared of content, even content related to their own field.

Teachers need to first and foremost not be afraid of content. The more inventive the teacher is in letting the students discover the content for themselves or in finding ways to bring content into the classroom the more interesting things will be for the students and for the teacher. Thus, the problem is not really dealing with the content, but rather finding it.