An ecological perspective on content-based instruction

An ecological perspective on content-based

instruction

Mark Garner*, Erik Borg

English Language Centre, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 8ST, Tyne and Wear, England, UK

Abstract

Content-based instruction (CBI) has been proposed as an effective method of preparing students

for study in English-medium universities. Although CBI has won adherents for its pedagogical

effectiveness, a theoretical basis for its success has not been fully articulated. There are a variety of

frameworks that may be used to provide this theoretical basis. This paper argues that an ecological

framework on language learning and use can provide this theoretical underpinning. A content-based

English pre-sessional course illustrates the proposed ecological framework. The course, using

a textbook for native-English speaking undergraduates [Seitz, J. L., (2002). Global issues:

An introduction. (2nd ed.). Oxford & Malden, MA: Blackwell], helps students learn the expectations

of university study through extended focussed reading, discussion and writing. In this way, EAP

skills are contextualized in an integrated learning process.

q 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Content-based instruction; Language ecology; English for academic purposes

1. Introduction

Increasing numbers of students whose first language is not English study in English-

medium universities worldwide. These students often need preparation before entry to

their degree programmes, preparation not simply in language skills but also in the

academic practices of their new institutions. Skill-based programmes, in which students

study in separate classes of reading, writing, speaking and listening, supplemented perhaps

by an extended writing or study skills class, have been a mainstay of many of these pre-

entry programmes. However, skills-based teaching has numerous problems, and many

Journal of English for Academic Purposes

4 (2005) 119–134

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1475-1585/$ - see front matter q 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/j.jeap.2004.08.002

* Corresponding author. Tel.: C44 191 227 3789; fax: C44 191 227 4439.

E-mail address: [email protected] (M. Garner).

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M. Garner, E. Borg / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 4 (2005) 119–134120

programmes are now turning to content-based instruction (CBI) as a means of preparing

students for university study in a new language and context.

In her contribution to a volume on content-based teaching, Ann Johns (1997a)

discussed the relationship between ESP and content-based instruction. While she began

from the position that “English for specific purposes (ESP) is a superordinate term for all

good ESL/EFL teaching, and content-based instruction (CBI) is a central force in this

movement” (p. 363), she went on to note that a major difference between CBI and ESP is

that “CBI practitioners seem to focus almost exclusively on pedagogy” (p. 366) without

the theoretical and research basis that characterises ESP.

This article investigates some of the problems with skills-based teaching, and the

strengths of CBI. As Johns (1997a) suggests, there is no fully articulated theoretical

framework for CBI, though a growing literature from a variety of perspectives provides

insight and support for CBI. Useful frameworks include social constructionism, actor–

network theory, academic literacy and language ecology. Language ecology provides

particularly a powerful lens through which to view CBI, as it places situatedness,

interaction and variability at the core of language theory, and it is this approach that will be

developed in this paper.

Context, which is the organising idea of CBI, is foregrounded in language ecology. At

the same time, language ecology calls for a deeper understanding of the role of

communication in language pedagogy, and particularly for English for academic purposes

(EAP). In this paper, we describe an ecological conception of language and suggest how a

concern of linguistics with rules has left an unfortunate legacy in EAP. We outline an

ecological view of communication and suggest how it can enrich theory and practice in

language teaching.

Finally, because context is central, this paper will provide an example of a situated

programme of CBI to suggest how theory can be implemented in practice. The course that

is the basis for this paper is a pre-entry course, originally designed for students planning to

enter postgraduate programmes at a UK university.

Within the broad domain of English for specific purposes, CBI has been advocated for a

number of years as the most educationally appropriate approach (Brinton, Snow, &

Wesche, 1989; Kern, 2000; Mohan, 1979) for EAP. The proponents of CBI see in it the

solution to a number of problems, such as: the lack of authenticity in English teaching

materials (MacDonald, 2003; Spector-Cohen, Kirschener, & Wexler, 2001); the

segregation of academic skills from their application (Benesch, 1992; Canagarajah,

2002; Dlaska, 2003); the failure to prepare students to enter the academic community of

their disciplines (Leki & Carson, 1994, 1997); and the need to cater for the variety of

discipline-related discourses and literacies (Baynham, 2000; Jordan, 1997). Recent

research into academic literacies has emphasized the ‘cultural and contextual component

of writing and reading [and, we would add, speaking and listening] practices’ and their

implications for students’ learning (Lea & Street, 1998, p. 158).

Though issues have been highlighted and practices criticised, an integrated theoretical

base for CBI has not been articulated. Particular programmes draw upon theoretical

insights; for example, genre analysis is extensively used to guide writing instruction.

Nonetheless, the principal argument adduced for CBI is typically pragmatic: it seems to

work pedagogically. If CBI is to take its place in EAP, not simply as a practical means to

M. Garner, E. Borg / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 4 (2005) 119–134 121

achieve educational goals, but as a field for research and well-informed development, we

believe that it needs a more global theoretical framework. This paper is a modest attempt

to encourage wide-ranging theoretical exploration of EAP in general, and CBI in

particular, by proposing an ecological approach to EAP. It calls into question some

assumptions about language that underlie much language teaching, including EAP, and

offers an alternative model centred on CBI. But first we must explain what we mean by ‘an

ecological approach.’

2. What is ‘an ecological approach’ to language?

In the narrowest sense, ecology looks at the relationships between biological organisms

and their environment. It tries to see the trees and the wood. In a wider context, however,

ecology is used to describe phenomena in their context and to understand both the context

and the interactions that create that context. It stands in contrast to analytic approaches,

which reduce complex systems to simple constituents, governed by mechanistic rules

(Hayward, 1995, p. 29).

Roszak (1980) writes of “an awakening awareness of wholes greater than the sum of

their parts.” Ecological thinking offers new insights in very diverse disciplines, and

transforms our understanding of the nature of language (Garner, 2004). Ecological thought

is far from uniform (Hayward, 1995, p. 8; Laferriere & Stoett, 1999, p. 24–25), but despite

various and sometimes conflicting interpretations among its proponents, certain elements

are common to all or most of its manifestations. They are that ecology is (a) holistic, (b)

dynamic and interactive, and (c) situated. These same categories can be applied to the

ecosystem of language.

2.1. Language is holistic

Language is holistic in that it is concerned with complex wholes and systems, focussing

on diversity, interaction, process, and complexity. In contrast to this view of language is

the notion that the essence of language is a system of abstract rules and relations. While

this view has been around since at least the Middle Ages (Garner, 2002, p. 11–14), it was

explicitly articulated by Saussure (1966 [1916]), for whom the underlying system (langue)

is the core of language, and hence the subject matter of linguistics; its actual

manifestations (parole) are incidentals. Following the Saussurean distinction (perhaps

much more rigidly than he intended), scientific linguistics became pre-occupied with rules.

However, from an ecological perspective on language, the actual manifestations constitute

the language: their characteristics and identities continuously mutually define the system

(Hayward, 1995, p. 29). An analytic approach to a complex system can say nothing

about how it works, or what its function is; for example, one can get no useful idea of

an engine by looking at its component parts unless one understands how they interact.

The environment is itself part of the interaction, and not merely a backdrop to the

main action.

Language teachers are profoundly aware that, while it is possible to analyse particular

skills or aspects of language use, communicative language use engages many skills


simultaneously. Like riding a bicycle, communication only happens when you pedal, steer,

and travel fast enough to remain stable. The fact that an aspect of language, such as the

coherence of an essay, can be isolated and inspected does not mean that a student can

produce this, or even grasp the concept apart from the matrix within which it is embedded.

The assumption that students can employ such analytic concepts outside of their context is

profoundly unecological.

2.2. Language is dynamic and interactive

Ecology is dynamic: each part is in a state of flux, and interacts with other elements to

create the environment within which they are situated. Education theory has begun to

move beyond the assumption that communication consists of transferring messages, a

view dubbed by Reddy (1979) as ‘the conduit metaphor’: the notion that messages flow, as

it were, through a channel between people. What are broadly described as ‘constructivist’

views underpin much contemporary thinking and practice in teaching all subject areas;

these see communication as the collaborative negotiation of meaning between participants

in an exchange. Success in such joint construction of messages depends on participants’

mutually agreeing on the validity of their interpretations (Garner, 1995). Unfortunately,

communication theory has not yet devised (and may never be able to do so) a simple

constructivist model that can compete with the eminently repeatable diagram that is still

prevalent in many textbooks and manuals on communication: sender/message/receiver (representing what we might call a postal version of the conduit metaphor).

Nevertheless, this diagram does not encompass the recursive, dialogic nature of language:

“To some extent, primacy [in expression] belongs to the response, as the activating

principle: it creates the ground for understanding.. Understanding comes to fruition only

in the response” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 282).

2.3. Language is situated

From an ecological perspective, language is grounded in the local situation, and an

utterance is determined by a complex of factors: the physical setting; the participants and

their mutual perceptions, relationship and intentions; other communicative means used

simultaneously, and so on. The ecological study of language focuses not on individual

elements and abstract rules, but on language as a form of being and behaving in the world. It

is appropriate that this understanding of language can be traced back to an ethnographer,

who wrote that “Language, and all Linguistic processes derive their power only from the

real processes taking place in man’s relation to his surroundings” (Malinowski, 1930,

p. 336; capitalisation in original).

Language and its social and cultural environment are “one indivisible totality.not a

bounded entity, but a process in real time” (Ingold, 1998, p. 169–170). Social

anthropologists have called for a “socially constituted linguistics in which.the

communicative functions of language in the constitution of social life are fundamental

to its essence” (Bauman & Briggs, 1990, p.79). In the early days of EAP, the majority of

syllabi were what Wilkins (1976, p. 2) called “synthetic” and Spector-Cohen et al. (2001),

call ‘Type A,’ which are explicitly or (more often) implicitly designed around the teaching


of structures and rules. They were informed by the “segregationism” of linguistic theorists

(Harris, 1996, p. 6) that often relies on analysis of language isolated from its purposes and

uses.

Segregationism involves the three-fold assumption that:

(1)
language is defined and generated by rules,
(2)
the rules can be learned in isolation from the social and cultural environment of
language use, and

(3)
learned rules can be meaningfully put into practice at a later stage when learners
encounter a real communicative context.

In reaction to the relative ineffectiveness of earlier approaches that were not adequately

situated, writers on EAP emphasize the need to embed the linguistic material in the activities

for which it has evolved: learning and teaching within an academic institution and the wider

disciplinary context. This is advocated, for example, by proponents of an academic literacies

approach (e.g., Graddol, Maybin, & Stierer, 1994; Lea & Stierer, 2000; Lillis, 1999, 2001),

and of teaching language as a situated practice (e.g., Widdowson, 1978, 1998a).

Because of the analytical and segregationist orientation of much linguistic writing,

however, there is a tendency in all language teaching to revert from time to time to

focussing on rules for constructing and deconstructing uncontextualized strings of

language. This is most obvious in the teaching of sentence grammar, which is still the

mainstay of many foreign language courses (including English as a foreign language), but

it is no less true of teaching discourse rules such as paragraph and essay structure. Despite

the concern of EAP with culturally and institutionally situated language, it is always

tempting to formulate abstract rules in the attempt to encapsulate a difficult concept for

students—not least because students themselves often demand to know the rule.

There is a subtle but very important difference between regarding linguistic rules as

constituting the language—an assumption that is fundamental to segregational linguistics

and is probably held by most language learners and not a few language teachers—and

regarding rules as useful guides to practice. Whilst the latter is the ecologically justifiable

view, it does not afford learners the level of apparent certainty and clarity provided by the

former. It is tempting, therefore, to replace (or at least supplement) situated language with

formulaic paragraphs, model lecture notes, and so on, independently of a real-life

communicative purpose, presented in an artificial context, constructed on the basis of what

is said to be typical of a discipline or professional practice.

This brings us to the question of communication, which is fundamental to an

understanding of language and of language teaching and learning.

3. An ecological view of communication

Jordan (1997, p. 1) gives a “rather general, working definition” of EAP as “concerned

with those communication skills in English which are required for study purposes in formal

education systems.” In a nicely ecological way, this definition explicitly sets the concerns

of EAP within the context of communication and, by implication, within a community (the

various teaching departments and the formal education system). To reiterate the point made


in the earlier sections, CBI strives to avoid equating communicative competence with the

teaching of disembodied language skills. Communication, one of the central themes of

language ecology, is about far more than language in the narrow sense.

While there is more that can be said about communication beyond language than can

possibly be discussed in a single paper, we would like to focus on one aspect: levels of

communication. In an ecological view, communication occurs at several levels

of complexity simultaneously. It does not consist of discrete messages, but of a series

of overlapping and interrelated meanings. The meanings constructed through communi-

cation are cumulative. Most approaches to discussing communication operate on one level

only, but, although it may be useful to focus on one or another level at various times, this is

at best a temporarily justifiable over-simplification. In exploring the relationships between

communication and education, we need to take a larger view. Single-level approaches

depict the process in terms of a message or a small set of closely connected messages, and

the single communicative act, such as an utterance, is presented as the paradigm for

communication in general. To give an example relevant to EAP, an essay is a single-level

communicative act. The event of which it is a part is the whole process of choosing the

topic, discussing possible approaches, reading and discussing the relevant literature,

perhaps handing in a draft for the lecturer’s comments prior to rewriting, etc.

In fact, we rarely communicate by means of isolated utterances (or sentences); the

finished essay (or the class presentation) does not alone encapsulate the educationally

relevant communication in which student and teacher are engaged. What constitutes the

message at any stage is partly determined by previous messages involving the same

participants, and will in turn partly determine the messages that follow. The process is

complex, and involves continuously negotiating meanings on several interrelated levels at

once. Three levels of complexity are significant for our discussion:

1.
the communicative act
2.
the communicative event
3.
the communicative link
An act comprises either a discrete piece of behaviour by one person, or more usually, a

brief exchange by which two participants achieve a single communicative function. Let us

illustrate this with some commonplace (but genuine) examples (from Garner, 1995):

1.
(Said at the start of the first lecture in a semester)
My name is Mary Jones, and I will be lecturing to you in this subject.

2.
(Written on a student’s assignment)
There are a number of problems with this essay. Make an appointment to talk to me

about it.

Communicative acts are part of a larger context. They are a series of acts that together

make up a higher-level, more complex whole: a book, a lecture, a conversation, an

exchange of correspondence. What is communicated by example 1, for instance, is only

partly comprehended by seeing it as an isolated act. It has additional communicative

significance as the opening gambit of the lecture itself. The function of example 2 is best


understood in the context of the essay-writing process and the lecturer’s written comments

throughout the text. It would be difficult for the student to interpret it, for example, if there

were no other comments on the essay.

These higher-level patterns of communicative behaviour are what we refer to as

communicative events. (Swales, 1990, p. 58 used the term, communicative event, in a

closely related sense in his definition of genres, but did not link it to the levels of

communication). Like acts, events have a recognizable form, including a beginning and an

end, a discernible function, and a single or connected series of topics. The form, structure,

and function of communicative events are largely culturally and historically determined.

Although the category is a little indeterminate, and overlaps with the other two levels in

places, most events may be fairly accurately described, and in some cases, such as a

parliamentary debate and certain rituals, their form may be strictly prescribed. An event is

made up of, and provides the context for, a number of acts.

At a greater level of complexity again is the communicative link, a term we borrow

from organisational communication theory (Jablin, 1982). This is the relationship between

the participants, which usually continues beyond a single event, and, in the case of

intimates, may encompass a whole lifetime. The link is in itself a form of communication,

which may be simple or complex, close or distant, long lasting, or short, and so on. Some

links (such as institutional structures) are defined quite independently of the actual

individuals involved; others (such as friendships) are entirely personal. Socially assumed

roles, in which interaction is initially defined by but not ultimately limited to institutional

structures, fall somewhere between the two. Classroom instruction, with its defined roles

for teachers and learners, is an example of this type of communicative link. Another

example is a discourse community, with its communicative goals, genres to achieve these

goals, and experts who maintain the generic identities (Borg, 2003). Nonetheless, it is

important to stress that, along with the act and event for which it provides the context, the

communicative link is an ecological concept: it is always embedded in, and manifests, a

specific communicative interaction.

The link is made up of and in turn is the context for a number, often a great number,

of events. One of the functions of communicative links is to allow those involved to

engage in events with relatively little effort at making, maintaining, and breaking

contacts, and to build on what has gone before. A university unit or subject is such a

link, which from a communication point of view is a closely connected series of

events—classes, reading, essays, examinations, informal discussions, and so on—with a

definable subject-matter and a specifiable series of functions or objectives. Each of the

events is, of course, meaningful in its own right, but an event’s full function and

significance can be understood only in the context of the communicative link, which

encompasses the subject, the dialogue among the students and teacher, and the

relationship with the discourse community that frames the discussion. A third example

may make this clearer:

3.
(Overheard in the corridor at a university)
Lecturer: Have you done those problems?

Student: What—the ones in chapter 4?

Lecturer: Yes.


Student: The ones you set for homework?

Lecturer: Yeah, have you done them?

Student: No.

Notice how the interpretation of the participants clearly depends on the communicative

link between them, at which they both hint (those problems; the ones in chapter 4; you set

for homework).

What makes a successful communicative link in an educational context? First of all, the

student creates meanings from the many events that make up the link: classes, discussions,

exercises, assignments, examinations, etc. Interactions with the teacher, both direct (such

as discussions or written comments on assignments) and implicit (such as listening to

lectures or reading), result in greater shared understanding or communicative grounding in

the subject matter by the student. The student is able to interpret what is being expressed in

such a way as to develop an increasingly sophisticated and valid understanding. At the

same time, he or she is increasingly a participant in a discourse community. This growing,

multilayered relationship provides the motivation for increased language learning. This is

what EAP aims to prepare the student for:

English for Academic Purposes refers to language research and instruction that

focuses on the specific needs and practices of particular groups in academic

contexts. It means grounding instruction in an understanding of the cognitive, social,

and linguistic demands of specific academic disciplines. This takes practitioners

beyond preparing learners for study in English to developing new kinds of literacy:

equipping students with the communicative skills to participate in particular

academic and cultural contexts. (Hyland & Hamp-Lyons, 2002, p. 2)

The CBI approach to EAP aims to avoid the problem of centring the communicative

link between teacher and student on the language itself. In CBI, the main goal of the

programme is to establish a communicative link in a way that is paradigmatic for the

target discipline. The communicative link is the developing shared knowledge of a

topic, which is created by a series of communicative events that are embodied in

communicative acts.

4. The purpose-built discipline as an environment for CBI

If CBI is to develop both as a practice and in its research base, it has to be seen in a

wider ecological context. Language arises from the communicative and cultural

environment in which language use is embedded. The environment of EAP is defined

by the institution (in particular the academic department), by the discipline itself, and by

the interactions engaged in by the discourse community of the discipline. CBI strives to

avoid segregating academic language by treating it as a set of rule-governed structures

(whether they be, for example, the syntax of a written sentence or the structure of a typical

academic lecture) and instead embedding it in an environment in which it is used to

achieve academic purposes rather than simply provide models for them. This goes beyond

providing ‘authentic’ texts (MacDonald, 2003; MacDonald, Badger, & White, 2000),


genre-based rules (Swales, 1990), discipline-specific vocabulary, and ‘naturalistic’

communicative acts or exchanges, although it may include any or all of these.

Such an environment can be provided by developing an academic communicative link

through the EAP curriculum, in which teachers and students engage in their own academic

processes and discourse, that is, through content-based instruction. Even within CBI, there

are a variety of ways in which to create these communicative links. For example, linked or

adjunct programmes, which are jointly delivered by discipline-specific (DS) teachers and

EAP specialists, offer great rewards of specificity (see Johns, 1997b, on joint pedagogical

endeavours), but because of the increased demands on DS teachers and departments, they

can be difficult to arrange.

This can leave an almost insurmountable problem. It is difficult and time-consuming

for a teacher to develop the appropriate knowledge and qualifications in another

discipline, even to the level of providing appropriate language support to students who

have already entered degree programmes. A more significant problem is that she or he

will find it difficult to teach across the many, often quite disparate, target disciplines of

the students in a typical generalized pre-entry programme that universities have to

provide these days.

The difficulty can, nonetheless, be largely surmounted if the EAP programme

establishes its own, purpose-built discipline environment. In this environment, staff and

students engage in a genuine, academic investigation of issues that, whilst they impinge

upon a number of different disciplines and allow students to bring to bear their existing

interests, experience, and expertise on the problems at hand, have their own internal

coherence and integrity. In our attempt to create such an environment, we were responding

to Widdowson’s (1998b, p. 712) call for teachers “to come to terms with the learners

reality and somehow create contextual conditions that are appropriate to them and that will

enable them to authenticate (the language) as discourse on their own terms.”

This is the theoretical framework within which we developed a new pre-Master’s level

programme for international students. Earlier, conventional skills-based EAP courses in

the institution had suffered from a number of problems, and proved generally

unsatisfactory in preparing students for their future studies. In particular, we found that

class time was spent contextualising readings; that graduates of our programmes reported

considerable difficulties listening to lectures in their subject areas; that the writing tasks

were not responsible to the discourse of a discipline. The programme focussed on

communication at the level of the individual act, with occasional recognition of

communicative events, such as lectures and projects. The communicative link, which is

the key to academic socialization and contextualisation, was virtually entirely overlooked.

Reading was separated from writing, and though there was, of course, talk in class, its

content was not the focus of the class. There was no accumulation of meaning over the

days and weeks of the course. In teaching reading, for example, time was spent

contextualising short readings—raising schemata, introducing vocabulary, and focussing

on the abstract structure of language. Only finally and where possible (which was not

frequently enough), did we engage with the issues raised by the readings. The validity of

the author’s claims and the view from which they arose, the arguments put forward to

support them, together with intellectual, philosophical, and ethical implications of what

was being read, were rarely addressed. In an effort to address the variety of target


disciplines of the students, readings were taken from unrelated domains, so there was no

accretion of knowledge within the class that could be used as a basis for intellectual

criticism.

Similarly, in teaching writing, we felt that the students were not accountable for what

they wrote. In this context, it makes sense to say to a student, for example, ‘Your English is

pretty good,’ but not to make the academically essential next step and say, ‘but your ideas

are muddled and unsupported.’ The teacher’s role was that of language adviser rather than

an academic to engage with.

Leki and Carson (1997, p. 41) use the term “text-responsible” to describe writing in

which students had to respond “based on content acquired primarily from text.” While

students on many EAP courses do not have to engage with the content of a particular

source, display understanding of that source and react to it, Leki and Carson show that

most writing in disciplinary specific courses is text responsible. Without text

responsibility, it is not possible to teach argumentation and critical thinking, which

teachers in recipient programmes tell us the students crucially need.

Our students plan to enter a variety of Master’s programmes: mostly business, some

computer science, and small numbers in design and other arts-related programmes.

Because of the variety of target programmes, we could not appropriately prepare students

for one particular programme without disadvantaging students planning on studying other

disciplines. In order to make it possible for English language teaching staff to play an

academic role, we decided to create our own communicative link, and introduce students

to a particular discourse community. The context that we chose was global issues.

Covering economic changes, the implications of technological innovation, and the impact

of global communication on local culture, this topic provided relevant content for most of

our students. We selected a textbook, Global Issues by John Seitz (Seitz, 2002), that had

been developed for undergraduate L1 students. As interested observers of world events

who had taught in some of the nations from which our students came, we had sufficient

expertise to dig deeper into the subject and teach it.

Teaching team members choose topics that are of particular interest to them and

through focussed reading, develop their knowledge of the area. The topics covered in Seitz

(2002) are not dissimilar to many of the topics covered in EAP materials, such as the

environment, energy and food (e.g., food distribution, genetic modification of food

sources, etc.). Working with an overarching theme, however, allows teachers to connect

one topic to another (population to food, food to environment) and create the intellectual

framework to address the issues critically as well as linguistically. The genre

characteristics of classroom discourse are informed by discussions with receiving

departments, and the educational background of the teachers, several of whom have

studied in areas relevant to the general topic. This framework then becomes a crucial

element in the communicative links formed in the classroom.

In this way, we formed our own authentic communicative link. We felt that

students who master one context of university education could more easily adapt their

learning to a new context than students who only engaged with the rules and

metacognitive contexts of language learning, such as the organisation of the typical

university essay.


4.1. Implementing the course

In terms of the actual practice of the course, each week students read a chapter of Seitz

(2002), or, in some cases, extended reading about topics such as education and English as a

world language that were not covered in Seitz. One of the ELT team members gives a

weekly lecture on the topic of the assigned readings. Discussion of the text briefly precedes

the lecture and then continues after it. Student-led seminar discussions on supplementary

readings further develop understanding of the topic. Seminar readings are chosen for their

differing approaches to the weekly topic. This portion of the course totals six hours per

week of content teaching and discussion. Two hours more are given to metalinguistic

analysis—discussions of genre, lexis, and textual conventions such as referencing and

criticality. Using student papers and the assigned readings, we also discuss argumentation

and evidence. The course also includes four hours focussed on writing a 3000-word

secondary-source paper on a topic chosen from a number related to the weekly themes.

(There is an additional four-hour primary research methodology block, in which students

plan, undertake, and report on a small research project. This component of the course is not

dealt with here.)

From an ecological perspective, academic reading, writing, speaking, listening,

argument, and so on, are inseparable parts of the processes of academic literacy. However,

it is possible to look at the different language skills to understand their contributions to a

holistic approach to preparation for academic study.

Reading is both at the centre of the course and pushed to periphery. It is central because

the textbook provides a “roughly tuned input,” to adapt Krashen’s term. It is roughly tuned

not only linguistically—that is, in lexis and syntax—but also, and more importantly for our

purposes, at the levels of discourse, concept, and culture. Reading is pushed to the

periphery in that it is done outside of class; students are expected to come prepared to

discuss the content of the assignment. This extended reading of twenty to forty pages a

week requires them to develop strategies for fluent reading and a large recognition

vocabulary. Schmitt and Carter (2000) and Krashen (1981) both call for narrow reading to

improve vocabulary acquisition. While the reading of a textbook (and related supporting

readings) is perhaps wider than Schmitt and Carter or Krashen anticipated, it fits the needs

of upper-intermediate students who plan to enter postgraduate study, with the substantial

reading that entails. The reading also provides meaningful input to which students bring

their own background knowledge.

The theme of globalisation and its consequences allows us to link content issues with

language and discourse. For example, in Seitz (2002), a section on air pollution manifests

academic hedging, and we have been able to help the students not only to recognize what

the author is doing, but also to evaluate what it suggests about his point of view and

academic neutrality (or otherwise). As another example, EAP textbooks (e.g., Jordan,

1999) usually include a section on various ways of representing and describing numerical

data. Seitz’s chapter on population contains 12 tables, graphs or charts, set in the context of

his discussion of the role of population in development. In class, students and teacher

discuss the benefits and disadvantages of a growing population and relate this to the

information that is presented in the charts and graphs. Then we step back from the content


and look at what is implied in each of the different ways of presenting numerical data

exemplified in the chapter.

The role of spoken language is crucial to developing academic literacy. Grabe (2001)

discusses the contribution of talk and discussion to the development of academic literacy.

As he says, “dialogue around texts and tasks needs to include critical inquiry and

commentary, awareness of both texts and task organization and content, and reflections on

text, author, language, process and task” (p. 38). Interaction and dialogue increase the

understanding of texts and develop skills such as critical thinking. Additionally, we focus

on spoken language because disciplinary subject teachers and former students have told us

that lecture listening and seminar participation remained significant problem areas even

for students who successfully completed a skills-based approach.

In developing lecture-listening ability, reading functions as the ‘pre-listening’ or the

contextualisation that is characteristic of academic subjects. Each week of our course

begins with a lecture on the topic of the assigned reading. Students come to the lecture, as

most people come to most lectures, with background knowledge of the topic based on their

reading. For our students, the prepared reading reduces the cognitive demands of listening

to a lecture, that is, the demands of dealing simultaneously with listening in a second

language and the introduction of new knowledge. In a post-course interview, one of our

students said,

[In this course] they have the lectures.and every lecture focus on one topic, and we

do seminar, focus on one topic one week, and we also give presentation according to

the topic you taught in the week. And so, so, we have some information, and

knowledge about the topic, and, you know, [the course], is quite.push us to write

the essay.

As this student suggests, listening and speaking are ineluctably linked, and both

contribute toward the preparation for writing. In seminar discussions, which are initially

led by the teacher but subsequently are turned over to the students, students look at

contrasting secondary articles, often opinion-based, on the theme of the lecture. They

discuss the bases for the opinions and evaluate the evidence provided. This engagement

with ideas helps in the development of critical thinking.

Atkinson (1997) argues that critical thinking is a culturally bound concept that students

can learn only through a process of “cognitive apprenticeship,” in other words, through the

sort of academic communicative link that a CBI programme offers. Critical thinking is

developed by creating cognitive dissonance, in which students must wrestle with

conflicting information, including their own and the teacher’s ideas and values, and

produce a synthesis that is personally valid. The communicative link between teacher and

student is essential here, in order to develop that sustained contact with knowledge and

another knower that may elicit this dissonance. Readings on population and education [(a

topic not directly covered in Seitz (2002)], but introduced as important to the theme and

relevant for our students) both evoked strong discussions about the topics, which led to a

number of papers that critically examined these issues.

Finally, because of its importance to postgraduate students (see Carson, 2001), writing

is the focus of both extensive practice and careful meta-analysis. Students are required to

write a 3000-word paper on a topic chosen from a list of titles related to the weekly topics


of study (as well as a 1500-word primary research paper for the research element of the

course). Since the readings that are discussed in seminar are often opinion pieces from

newspapers and other publications, they become the basis for genre analysis, contrasting

with the coursebook and other academic texts.

In this programme, students develop intertextual relationships simultaneously with an

interpretative response. The source text becomes the framework for the students’ writing,

situating the vocabulary and language structures in the content knowledge, and engaging

them in intellectual and personal interpretation. They are encouraged to inform their

discussion and assignments with personal insights. For example, this is a passage from a

student paper on education:

Textbooks are essential to teaching literacy in many parts of the world where book

hunger or even famine is endemic, where teaching is by rote and memorization of

information, not always accurate and seldom up to date. When I studied in my

university, one of my classmates, who came from a small village in West China, told

me his learning experience. He was the first student to go to university in the history

of his village during the recent half century, and the learning materials he used was

only his textbooks, which were copied from higher grades students’ by his hand.

‘Besides the guidance of my teachers, textbooks were all of what I had. In the

hardest time of my life, they brought me light, hopes and impetus and so on.’ This

was what he described what the books meant to him.

Most students appreciate that they are studying an academic subject in a focussed way;

the high face validity of the course is one of its attractions. A student described the course

as being “different from other language courses. It seems like a university course.” By

engaging in interpreting and creating meaning, this approach prepares the students better

for the ecology of communication within their target disciplinary departments. This is

because it:

†
is a situated and changing practice rather than a static “knowledge” or “skill”;
†
involves the language skills, but also includes pragmatic awareness and, in particular,
intellectual and moral engagement;

†
develops in students an awareness of textual conventions (such as genres), specific
disciplinary expectations, and cultural background knowledge (e.g., historical or

contextual background) through the process of learning and acculturation;

†
recognises situated approaches to texts, for example, the Anglophone discourse of
criticality;

†
builds on the variety of academic and literate practices in the students’ home languages
and cultures (adapted from Kern, 2000, p. 16).

5. Limitations and conclusion

Content-based teaching using the theme of global issues provides an ecological

framework for the preparation of students for academic study, in that it is holistic and

reflects the dynamic nature of real-world use. It is situated in a meaningful context.


This framework allows students to engage with texts and spoken language so as to develop

their abilities both linguistically and intellectually.

We want to acknowledge the limitations of our approach. It can be difficult to assess the

results of any methodology; we are currently undertaking a long-term assessment of the

results. However, on an anecdotal level, students and teachers on our programme have

responded very well to the demands of a new course, and disciplinary teachers support the

approach. CBI was initially instituted for one cohort of postgraduate students; however,

after it had run successfully for several semesters, it was extended, using different themes

and different teachers, to other courses, both undergraduate and postgraduate.

Overall, we prefer the linked or adjunct model of content-based instruction (Brinton

et al., 1989; Johns, 1997b), as more deeply embedded in its relevant context. However,

linked CBI is not practicable for groups of students planning on entering a variety of

programmes. For such students, theme-based CBI provides an effective alternative.

Teaching CBI puts new demands on teachers; they need to feel comfortable both

teaching the theme that has been chosen, and relating the content of that theme to EAP-

specific knowledge, such as genre analysis, without the guidance of a textbook.

The final issue that we would like to mention is that our theme of global issues

addresses the needs of most of our students, but students who plan to enter programmes

that are quite different from ours (such as those reported by Spector-Cohen et al., 2001)

benefit from the study of other themes. We have extended the range of purpose-built

disciplines for different groups, to include the sociology of international students in

contemporary Britain and the philosophical issues raised by current affairs.

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Mark Garner has taught languages and applied linguistics and engaged in communication research at

universities in Australia and Britain. He is currently Programme Director of Applied Linguistics at

Northumbria University. He is the author of Critical English Grammar, and Language: An Ecological View

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Erik Borg has taught English for academic purposes in China, Oman and Britain. He is director of the pre-

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Documents

An ecological perspective on content-based instruction