© 1992 by Oxford University Press
Articles |
A holistic approach to college ESL: integrating language and content
Linda Lonon Blanton is Professor and Chair of English at the University of New Orleans. She is a former president of Louisiana TESOL and currently represents TESOL on the Commission on the English Language of NCTE. Recently she returned from a year in Morocco, where she set up an ESL programme in a K-12 school in Casablanca. She is particularly interested in the intersection of linguistic theory and classroom practice
Although several curricular models have emerged at the post-secondary level to integrate language and content and, thereby, facilitate students' transition from ESL to mainstream college courses, some programmes still rely on a skills model to develop students' proficiencies. The skills model is inadequate for a number of reasons: it deprives students of the linguistic and intellectual immersion necessary for language acquisition and cognitive development to take place, and it particularly hampers refugee and immigrant students—whose secondary, English-medium schooling may have been poor—from developing the deep literacy on which their academic success depends. Only a content-oriented curriculum can meet these needs. A whole language approach—text-based and student-centred—is offered as a viable alternative to various models, both traditional and new. What the whole language model is, how it works in the classroom, and what its benefits are form the focus of this paper.