Applied Linguistics and Language Teacher Education by Nat Bartels

BIGELOW AND RANNEY 191traveling to a particular region of Ecuador, a task that would naturally elicit the targetedstructure (e.g., There are many mountains in Educator. It is a country on the PacificOcean).While most of the participants (15, or 75%) were able to achieve integration tovarying degrees on this assignment, four participants (5 or 25%) we characterized as notsucceeding in making the connection. This was because they used disjointed topics andthe tasks were less well-designed for eliciting the structure. Typical problems werelessons that did not use a unified content throughout the lesson but instead jumped fromone topic to another, used tasks that did not naturally call for the targeted structure, orimposed artificial restrictions on the communicative task.3.3.2 Integrating Content and Language in CBI: Path 2The thematic unit assignment, completed for the pedagogy course, followed Path 2,beginning with content and then optionally integrating a language focus. (Optionalbecause not all content-based lessons will have a linguistic focus.) We chose to comparethe grammar lessons to the thematic unit to ascertain any difference in successfulintegration according to path chosen. This was an interesting comparison to us becausethe two assignments were carried out at the beginning and end of the program,respectively, and by design asked participants to follow different planning processes. Weexpected to see many excellent examples of integrating language and content. We weresurprised, however, to find that three of 13 units analyzed, although they includedinstruction related generally to the language modalities, did not include any form-relatedobjectives, thus no examples of integration. Yet, when participants chose to includelanguage objectives in their unit (Path 2), the success with which they integrated themwas comparable (within 7 percentage points) to the grammar lesson following Path 1,with these main differences: a.) Path 2 lessons were more successful at including tasksthat required that the form be used in a natural uncontrived way (77% versus 50%), b.)Path 2 lessons were more successful at fitting the form into the overall curriculum thatwould be based on content (89% versus 75%), and c.) Path 2 lessons were weaker onwhether the language objectives were assessed in a way that also included content (80%versus 90%).3.3.3 What Language is Targeted and How Often?We analyzed the two CBI assignments in two ways: first to find out what generallanguage objectives participants chose to include in their planning and second, the formsthey chose to target when grammar was included in an objective. It was important toexamine the types of language objectives participants chose to target because this is howlanguage development is guided and tracked in CBI. Additionally, these are assignmentsfollowing Path 2, where planning begins with content materials and we were curiousabout how beginning with the content might matter in terms of integrating language.