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EFL and
Educational Reform
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Content-based
Interaction in Argentina
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Content-based instruction, or the use of subject
matter for language teaching purposes, has been implemented in a variety of ESL and EFL
teaching settings. The approach takes many different forms and often requires rethinking
of current practices in areas such as syllabus design, materials selection, teacher
training, and assessment.{ Footnote 1
) It presents particular challenges in settings where teachers are accustomed to
traditional approaches to language teaching. In this article, we describe some initial
experiences with content-based instruction which were precipitated, in part, by reform of
the.
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Teachers in Argentina waited many years for a
law which could outline a curriculum meant to fit the modern world. The new Federal Law of
Education (Ley Federal de Educación) was finally established in March 1997.{ Footnote 2 ) Broadly speaking, the law
divides schooling into three main stages or cycles: Initial Education (Educación
Inicial), EGB (Educación Genreal Básica-General Basic Education) and Multi-track
Education (Educación Polimodal).( Footnote 3 ) The actual number of years of schooling has remained the
same; the organization and labels have changed. The importance of the law lies in the fact
that for the first time in the history of the country, the Ministry of Education of each
province and the federal government collaborated to create an organizational device that
could provide a curriculum for the entire country. The Initial cycle consists of three
years (ages 3 to 5) with only the last year mandatory (see Figure 1). EGB is made up of
three cycles: first, second, and third, each of them three years long. Multi-track
Education consists of three years. The new curriculum increases mandatory education from
seven to ten years.
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The law establishes that foreign languages will
be taught from the second cycle of EGB, English being one of the possibilities throughout
the EGB, but mandatory the first year of Multi-track Education. The focus of the new
English curriculum is on communicative competence. The content to be covered has been
divided into three categories: Procedural, Attitudinal, and Cross-Curricular. The
Procedural content refers to the "how to" of language: skills, processes,
strategies, and methods. The Attitudinal content refers to the set of rules, values,
virtues, and attitudes, both personal and social, that will underlie all the activities in
the English classroom. Cross-Curricular content refers to topics or themes that do not
belong to any special discipline but reflect the whole of the National Curriculum.
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Taking into account all the provisions indicated
in the new law, teachers in Argentina are facing a great challenge-turning theory into
practice. We believe that a content-based approach provides an excellent means by which to
cover such a wide spectrum of requirements deriving from the new education law. To
implement the new Federal Law of Education will be a difficult task for most schools in
Argentina. Lack of information, insufficient time to become acquainted with the new
requirements and to train teachers, ongoing changes (the law has already been modified
twice in a couple of months), and the shortage and lack of resources will no doubt hamper
implementation.
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An elementary school example: Escuela de los Padres
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In one school, Escuela de los Padres, the
prospects for change look very bright. The school is located in Venado Tuerto, a town in
the south of the province of Santa Fe, about 380 km from Buenos Aires, the capital city.
The school board is made up of students' parents who decide on administrative matters,
whereas the academic and pedagogic issues are in the hands of the department heads. The
English program was born to satisfy the demands of the community: English is viewed as the
international language for communication and in most cases as the key for professional
success. The program of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) at Escuela de los Padres has
202 students, their ages ranging from 3 to 12. Classes are usually made up of 20 students.
Three- and four-year olds start with half an hour a day of EFL instruction. When they turn
five, the number of hours is increased to six per week as a transition to elementary
school where all grades have two hours and a half of EFL instruction from Monday to
Thursday. (The fifth, sixth, and seventh grades have English classes on Friday: history,
geography, and science.) Literature is integrated in all other syllabuses, especially in
language. Students attend the mainstream in Spanish in the morning and their English
classes in the afternoon.
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Two years ago, when I started working in the
school, content was already part of the school curriculum as of third grade.( Footnote 4 ) Having content as a
component of the school curriculum was a good start, but it did not go far enough.
Teachers believed that content instruction resulted in greater gains for students and
thus, they made great efforts to use it. Yet sometimes this instruction was reduced to
teachers' lectures and students' memorization of lessons from a textbook. The program
lacked a coherent syllabus and there was some overlap in the topics covered in the
different grades. In addition, communication between English and Spanish teachers was
practically nonexistent. Last, but not least, the syllabus for lower grades (kindergarten,
first, and second grades) needed to be revised towards a more integrated approach to
language and content. Therefore, with the invaluable help of our advisor, Ms. de la Vega,
we thought out a scheme to start working on these issues.
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Last year was solely devoted to the
implementation of an inservice teacher training program. Workshops were conducted on a
monthly basis. These aimed at familiarizing teachers with the new thinking and
developments in integrated language and content instruction and at providing teachers with
a solid grounding in the language arts. By developing the language arts, students also
develop the tools they need throughout the curriculum and their life-long learning.
Informal feedback-after-class observations provided me with many useful opportunities to
go over certain points teachers were not sure about and to become more sensitized to their
concerns and needs. Teacher "buy-in" was immediate. All of them were very
enthusiastic about the project and were responsive to comments and suggestions. Theory was
put into practice, not only in the language classes, but in the content classes as well.
The school board was also very supportive; in fact, a monthly allowance was granted to me
to provide teachers with the necessary resources: tape- recorders, books, cassettes,
videos, etc.
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This year the focus is mainly on content. Our
main objectives are to start introducing content-based instruction as of kindergarten and
to develop a content-based curriculum that meets the requirements of the new law. The
introduction of children's literature in kindergarten is our first step towards a more
content-oriented syllabus with young learners. Simple but authentic stories have opened up
endless possibilities to use English in contexts that are both meaningful and attractive
to our children.
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In regards to the new curriculum, we are trying
to find a balance between the content syllabuses teachers have been using so far, the
subject matter dealt with in Spanish, and the requirements of the new law. The approach
for selecting and sequencing topics in the new law is spiral; that is, the main topics are
the same, but the level of difficulty changes and the sub-topics become more detailed and
suited to the students' linguistic, developmental, and intellectual levels. To make the
topics even more relevant and appealing, we are trying to choose new, interesting
information that complements what the students have studied in Spanish. Our objective,
however, is not to focus only on what they already know, but also to explore other related
topics. Hands-on experiments in natural sciences and surveys, interviews, and research in
social studies provide students with excellent opportunities for meaningful content-based
instruction in English.
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Next year our goal is to start reducing the
number of hours devoted to language teaching per se and to increase the number of hours
devoted to content instruction in English.( Footnote 5 ) The project is ambitious. Yet we are convinced that the
combination of language and content is a very powerful tool to make our EFL program a more
challenging and profitable experience for students, teachers, and administrators. We are
all fully committed to this goal.
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A secondary school example: Colegio de Asis
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As the new Federal Law of Education has just
been put into practice in Argentina, there are many issues that teachers, especially those
teaching in the last level of EGB or in the Multi-track cycle, still have to consider.
Many teachers argue that the use of language for communication is still very limited and
very limiting. There are many schools in the provinces or in different areas of the big
cities, where changing the approach towards a more communicative one may be a formidable
challenge as teachers have to deal with numerous problems both inside and outside the
classroom (for example, more than 40 students in a class, lack of materials, poor student
motivation, too many teaching hours, low salaries) to feel comfortable with implementing
such a sudden change.
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However, some public and private schools, in
Buenos Aires and in other urban areas in Argentina have to face a different type of
problem. This is the case of the Colegio de Asis, among many others. Here, classes have
always been small and students with the same English proficiency have been grouped since
the beginning of secondary school. We have been working with a communicative approach for
many years. At first, the new curriculum seemed to bring nothing new to us, but we soon
discovered that it mandated that English had to share certain themes with other
subjects-natural sciences, social sciences, technology, arts, and ethics-as part of the
movement towards a more integrated curriculum. We then decided that this could be the
chance we needed to add more content to our classes. Up to now, content had been an excuse
to teach language in a more contextualized, pseudo-realistic way. We decided that if we
could find connections with other points in the curriculum, content could become more
prominent in our classes. We hoped this would raise motivation as language would then
become a means to learn content, which we thought would surely enhance our English
classes.
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The process towards content-based English
instruction has not been simple. First we tried to look for topics which could have points
of contact with other subjects in the curriculum within the syllabuses of the current
English courses. The result was nonexistent: Most of the EFL materials used at the school
dealt with a few topics in basic communicative language, but there was no really academic
material at all. Finally we thought the best thing to do was to start exactly the other
way around, by asking content teachers what things they would be interested in sharing,
what themes, topics and/or materials they thought students could deal with or get
information from in their English classes.
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We did not think this task was going to be so
hard. The first step we took consisted of asking our content colleagues in the teachers'
room what content they would like us to cover in our classes. We explained to them that
our idea was to make thematic units based on the topics they suggested and use materials
they could provide or they thought would be interesting for our students to work with.
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At the beginning, content teachers were not very
enthusiastic about working with us. Maybe they did not want to share with us or they
thought that this would add more work to the busy school schedules. It is also important
to point out that teachers of English have traditionally been looked down on in Argentina,
mainly because they are very innovative and generally up-to-date professionally. This
reaction led us to get in touch with the school director and the academic board, who have
always been in favor of integrating the different areas in the curriculum. The authorities
of the school thought that the idea of including more content in the English classes was
very interesting, so they decided to organize several meetings with the heads of the
different departments, and the project finally started to grow. We then worked with some
of the subjects suggested by the content teachers and developed thematic units
accordingly. Those fortunate teachers who found a content teacher willing to share
knowledge and resources with them started to work on the new task of creating thematic
units that would exploit content and language. Some other teachers who were not so lucky
are still waiting for their content teacher colleagues to make up their minds and join
them in this new endeavor. Starting gradually, teachers plan to add more content to their
English classes in order to help students develop study skills and more sophisticated
strategies that could help them succeed in their future academic studies. The complex
issue of assessment in this new content-based approach is also being discussed.
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We know that the road towards content- based
instruction will take us in many directions and it is, perhaps, too soon to speak about
results. At the outset, however, we have seen a marked rise in students' as well as
teachers' motivation. The road ahead may be long, but it is good to know that we have
taken the first steps.
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As we undergo these educational changes in
Argentina, it is important to point out that the dramatic shift from a traditional
grammar-oriented approach towards a communicative approach that also takes into
consideration the acquisition of academic skills and the use of language as a tool for
learning content may become overwhelming for most teachers. This is especially true in
light of the fact that the majority of the teachers have not undergone the kind of
training required to make a positive change out of these innovations. Even though these
changes were meant to be gradual, implementation has already started and may find most
teachers willing but unprepared. On the positive side, we believe that the current
educational reform in Argentina will provide an impetus towards content-based instruction
in settings where more traditional approaches have remained strong and greater support in
schools where teachers are already committed to integrated instruction. All in all,
Argentine schools face a remarkable opportunity to conform to the federal mandates and
develop an EFL curriculum that is in keeping with one of the latest trends in English
language teaching worldwide.
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- Mohan, B. 1986. Language and content. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Snow, M., and D.
Brinton. eds. 1997. The content-based classroom: Perspectives on integrating language and
content. New York: Addison Wesley Longman.
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Marguerite
Ann Snow is professor of Education at California State University, Los Angeles and
coordinator of the TESOL Masters Program at the Instituto Cultural Norteamericano (ICANA)
in Buenos Aires, Argentina. |
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Viviana
Cortés is an English instructor at ICANA, ICANAES (Teacher Education College),
and at Colegio de Asis in Buenos Aires, Argentina. |
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Alejandra
V. Pron is the head of the English Department at Escuela de los Padres and the
head of HIT (an institute supervised by ICANA) in Venado Tuerto, Santa Fe, Argentina. |
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Footnote 1
1. See Mohan (1986) for a discussion of the theoretical rationale and Snow and Brinton
(1997) for a comprehensive treatment of issues in content-based instruction.
Footnote 2
2. The new law is contained in the document "Programa de Asistencia Tecnica para
las Transformacion Curricular," Ministerio de Cultura y Educacion de la Nacion
Argentina, 1996.
Footnote 3
3. We decided to coin this word to reflect the fact that this cycle allows students to
choose among several technical and professional tracks. The tracks are: Socio-humanistic,
Administration, Art, Industry and Agronomy, Environment, and Health.
Footnote 4
4. All through the article we use the word grade when we talk about primary school to
avoid confusion, but, since the law has not been fully implemented, some are called years
and some are called grades.
Footnote 5
5. A way to achieve this is to start delivering English classes on Fridays
to all grades. Since this change may bring about some resistance from parents and
administrative problems as well, it will be carried out gradually, starting next year with
4th grade only.
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