This was the title of a presentation I gave at TESOL-Spain in San Sebastian last year and I have just received an email from a teacher (hello Abbie) asking for information on it.

Content and Language Integrated Learning refers to the approach of teaching curricular subjects (history, science, art, etc) and a foreign language at the same time and is nearly always associated with young learners. The aim of my talk was to address how certain aspects of this approach may be applied to adults who are learning English for no specific purpose.

If a teacher decides to go for a content-enriched approach, the possibilities are endless. Here are some ideas:

Exploit the technological generation gap

Many adults will find themselves on the unfortunate side of the technological generation gap. The English classroom could be regarded as an opportunity to teach any of the following:

• How to download a podcast
• How to transfer photographs from your digital camera onto your computer
• How to use an online image search engine
• How to use learner-friendly corpora
• How to buy a song from iTunes

Alternatively, Web 2.0 and its affects on society (both good and bad) could provide the subject of discussion. How many of the following terms can you explain?

(Image by Markus Angermeier)

Science

• Here is a good site with some great optical illusions. After describing illusionary effects, students can look into the science behind them.
• Nature and wildlife are also good. Here is a lesson on the blue whale.
• I recently saw a friend of mine demonstrate a lesson plan that involved looking at the space and space exploration. His lesson was designed for children but could have been used with adults with little or no adaptation.

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field could be a good starting place for finding out more about planets, solar systems, stars, galaxies, the milky way, the universe, the big bang and more.

Music

One of the activities was demonstrated during the TESOL-Spain presentation involved teaching students the language of musical notation. For example:

• In common time (4/4), there are 4 crotchets in a bar.
• A quaver is worth half a beat.
• A minim rest means silence for 2 beats, etc.

Following this we attempted to clap some simple notated rhythms before examining the relationship between musical rhythms and stress-timed languages.

Art

Click here for a lesson plan on using art in the classroom.

Current affairs

Lat month I posted an idea which involved using a BBC podcast - From our own correspondent. Another resource that I like is the “24 hours in pictures” slideshow from www.guardian.co.uk. Here is one possible way of planning a lesson around the images: 24-hours-in-pictures.pdf

Language and basic linguistics

Dave Willis writes, “the serious study of language should be a central part of any language learning course.” He encourages teachers to adopt a CLIL approach with linguistic description as content and has uploaded a lesson plan titled Vague Language which can be downloaded from his website.

Humans are expert language users but that does mean that we understand the complexities that underlie it any more than a couch potato understands how a television works. It can pay to address any of the following:

• Sign language
• Variation in language
• Change in language
• Characteristics of spoken language
• Sociolinguistics

Two books that I recommend are Larry Trask’s Language, the basics and David Crystal’s Encyclopedia of the English language, both of which are clearly written and enlightening.