vol. 1 núm. 1 (2008)

This paper illustrates how a detailed analysis of lexical choices can evince the author’s ideological message in seemingly expository texts. The activity described, part of the content-based course English V: Technology, Environment, and Progress in the International Relations Program at the Universidad del Norte, leads students to the realization of their tendency to accept every written text as an objective depiction of reality without questioning the writer’s purpose or intentions. Furthermore, the comparison of two texts dealing with the same topic but written from opposing points of view helps the students understand how language can be manipulated for particular purposes.

Designing courses can be a long and difficult process. In this paper the authors share a design project, which they are involved with at the Instituto de Idiomas at the Universidad del Norte in Barranquilla, Colombia for International Business majors. The authors share the difficulties of deciding the path to take in course design, especially content oriented, the considerations made during the design of the program, and the plan for further development. In the end, the authors invite all teachers to participate in course design as it is an enriching experience as well as a complicated process.

Over the past twenty years, in a number of different domains, I have been preoccupied by the relationship between content and language. Finding myself the editor of a family of general encyclopedias in the late 1980s brought an encounter with "knowledge" which had to be integrated with my professional linguistic concerns. This has since developed to include issues in document classification, search, e-commerce, and Internet security. Other directions of integration emerged in higher education, notably the need for a synergy between linguistic and cultural studies and between language and literature. And accompanying all this has been a major change in public attitudes to language, following the reaction against institutionalized linguistic prescriptivism and the evolution of a fresh understanding of the relationship between standard and nonstandard language. The varied nature of these examples suggests the need to consider the question of integration at an appropriately general level, and it is this - on analogy with established domains such as the philosophy of science or the philosophy of religion - that the title of my paper is intended to address.

Manipulatives are only for math classes and kindergartners, right? Wrong! Since Rita Dunn’s ground-breaking research on learning styles and Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, educators of all subjects have tried to develop teaching techniques that allow all types of students to learn. Because of their highly visual and kinesthetic/tactile character, manipulatives are an especially powerful tool for ESL-content instruction. However, they are relatively unknown in the ESL field because many teachers believe that manipulatives can only be used with the very young or in math classes. In this article, I will explain how using manipulatives in class can turn learning into a fun and meaningful experience. I will provide 7 different teacher-made manipulatives that have been used in ESL language arts, science and social studies classes.

This article illustrates the application of strategies on the part of the lecturer to teach a course of accounting in English to non-native English speakers. The following approaches proved to be the most useful: students realizing the importance of acquiring technical vocabulary in English; applying theory during the class as a language strategy; using different bibliographic sources such as journals, books and websites; writing papers which demonstrate student’s comprehension; communicating theory utilizing visual tools such as graphs, tables, beamer presentations; progressively reapplying the same financial procedures to more sophisticated settings with increasingly more text; consolidating a strong relationship of cooperation between the lecturer and the Foreign Language Department. This is a process of continuous improvement, hence the need to share results with other instructors and to observe similar experiences from different universities.

Universidad de La Sabana in Colombia has been increasing course work in English, and the need for adequate learning and teaching strategies has become salient as both students and instructors expressed concern of a foreign language impeding content acquisition. Through a seminar on English Content-Based Instruction, the Foreign Languages Department identified underlying problems related to language, such as the need for language strategies in mainstream courses in areas such as academic writing and reading. The English Content-Based Instruction approach seeks to simultaneously teach content and language. The need for instruction to be focused on fostering autonomous learning became apparent given the heterogeneity of learning styles. Two geography courses taught in English are discussed here in light of an overall survey on learning strategies.

This chapter discusses the role that context plays in comprehension when teaching and learning content. Two constructs provide the framework: The first deals with Cummins’ (2000) distinction of Basic Interpersonal Communication skills (BICS), Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency skills (CALPS) and Common Underlying Language Proficiency (CULP). The second construct appeals to Bradford and Johnson's findings on the role of context in comprehension (cited by Omaggio 1986). As a replication of Bradford and Johnson's experiment a reading workshop was conducted with 19 teachers of English participating in the First English Content-Based Learning and Instruction Symposium held at Universidad de La Sabana in Bogotá D.C in 2006. The teachers were given a science text in French in which the effect of no-context, partial-context and full-context on reading comprehension was explored. Results suggest that the successful completion of the task did not correlate highly with the participants’ self-assessment of their French proficiency but with the presence or absence of advance organizers, in this case pictorials. The results and the implications for course and materials design close the discussion.

This paper presents a brief description of English Content Based Instruction (CBI) as a process in which the student gains mastery of the language (procedural knowledge) and mastery of the subject learned (declarative knowledge) and the characteristics of its integration in the teaching process. Also, the author describes his experiences in planning and giving a course on Financial Analysis using the techniques of CBI and student-centered learning and the tools and procedures used in performing this task. Furthermore the experiences of other universities in giving CBI courses are reflected upon. The result of a survey about the perception of the course among a representative sample of the students is presented and analyzed and suggests.