A Practical Research Of Teaching English In Middle School Using Content-Based Instruction

Content-based Instruction originated from ‘Language Immersion',which is a method of teaching a second language in the 1950 s and 1960 s in Canada.It was extended and used in foreign language teaching by scholars from the US in the 1980 s and 1990 s and has been widely used in other countries in the 21 st century.As a new approach to teaching a second language,CBI combines language teaching and content teaching.Explorations and practice of CBI in China in recent years has been mostly limited to English major students in universities and English instruction at various kinds of secondary vocational schools.However,there is not much research on the implementation of courses using CBI taught at general middle schools in China.Therefore,this study is trying to put English Science,an English course based on CBI taught in Grade Nine into teaching practice to explore its feasibility and effectiveness in order to provide valuable reference in this field.This research is based on Second Language Learning Theory,Cognitive Learning Strategy,and Comprehensible Input.The subjects in this research are 429 students from 16 classes of Grade Nine at Dalian Maple Leaf International Middle School and four English Science teachers(two Canadian and two Chinese).This research lasted 15 weeks.The author made a systematic qualitative and quantitative analysis of the implementation of English Science in a middle school in order to answer the following three questions: 1)How can CBI be put into practice when conducting English Science teaching in Grade Nine? 2)In what ways can CBI improve students' English language skills? 3)What are the challenges in using CBI to teach English and how can they be resolved?The results of this study can be summarized as follows: First,taking into account the limited English level of students,some of the teaching contents and teaching methodologies need to be adapted in order to improve the comprehension of the course material.Second,the successful implementation of CBI in middle schools does not only improve students' English language skills,especially listening and speaking,but also enhances their critical thinking skills.Third,it is recommended that studies be conducted in developing other CBI English courses in middle schools.All things considered,an in-depth analysis of the problems of conducting the present course would be needed in order to help middle school students improve their ability of using English in practical situations and to obtain the maximum benefit of English courses based on CBI.