ASSESSING THE IMPACT OF CONTENT-BASED INSTRUCTION ON LEARNING EFL IN AN ESP CLASS

• Main Author: Moundir Al Amrani
• Format: Article
• Language: deu
• Published: University of Oradea 2019-03-01
• Series: Journal of Languages for Specific Purposes
• Subjects: Content-Based Instruction; English for Specific Purposes; English as a Foreign Language; CLIL; Comprehension; Vocabulary
• Online Access: http://jlsp.steconomiceuoradea.ro/archives/006/JLSP6_2.pdf
• ISSN: 2359-9103; 2359-8921

English for Specific Purposes (ESP) is the field of language teaching and learning of English in a specific area of specialty. However, learning ESP is not to be understood as just learning a set of technical vocabulary and expressions; it is about learning to use English in a given specific context with the implication of all the skills and objectives of language learning. This qualitative research investigates the impact of Content-Based Instruction (CBI) on developing comprehension and vocabulary in a course of English for Specific Purposes at an engineering school in Morocco where English is learnt as a Foreign Language (FL). A total number of 40 students were divided into two groups of 20 students per class and were taught a fifteen-hour course of legal English over a period of six weeks. Each class lasted one hour and fifteen minutes, at the pace of two classes per week. Focus was on reading comprehension and learning vocabulary in an interactive way by engaging the learners actively. At the beginning, both groups were given the same pre-test to determine their present knowledge of legal English. After the experiment period, another post-test was administered to the students to determine their level of progress. At first, the results of both groups in each test were compared with each other. Then, the results of each group in the pre-test were compared with the results of the same group in the post-test. The general result is that both groups have made progress in improving comprehension and vocabulary capabilities in legal English. As for same-group results, the experiment group have managed to make significant progress in their post-test results compared to their pre-test results, while the control group maintained their higher score shown in the pre-test. The conclusion drawn from this is that Content-Based Instruction does help students improve their comprehension and vocabulary capabilities in ESP. Therefore, focus on content does yield positive results in learning language. Reducing content to just a topic through which learners learn language may cause the learners to miss a learning opportunity. Thus, there may not be a reason to give the content aspect of a language course less importance than the language aspect.