Negotiating Curricular Transitions: Foreign Language Teachers' Learning Experience with Content-Based Instruction

Abstract

Content-based instruction (CBI) has been touted as an effective curricular approach in a wide range of educational contexts, including immersion and English as a second language. Yet this approach to curriculum design is rarely implemented in conventional K–16 foreign language (FL) programs in the United States today. The phenomenological study described here attempted to gain a deeper understanding of factors affecting the implementation of CBI by exploring three traditional FL teachers' learning experiences during a year-long professional-development program designed to introduce the approach. Transitioning toward CBI, the findings suggest, can be a professionally intimidating experience, involving a struggle to re-examine one's own teaching identity and one's vision of what teaching and learning ought to be. Important implications emerging from this study include a need for professional-development programs to better scaffold teachers' learning experience and to create safer environments for teachers to explore pedagogical alternatives.