Authentic Integrated Content Based Instruction ... Phew! That's a Mouthful!

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As an ESL teacher at an Intensive English Program, I am a huge believer in three primary pedagogical approaches: authentic student products, integrated curriculum and content based instruction. So what I try to do in my classes is assure all these things happen, and I do it with e-portfolio blogs.

Simply, these where we take student products from all skill areas (reading, writing, listening and speaking and grammar), put them in a portfolio that we then publish online. I will explain this in more detail below the jump, but I encourage you to first browse (by clicking the photo) what we have done for my Level 4 (high intermediate) students this summer.


Authentic Student Products

Maybe it is because of my personal background, but I think people learn better when they make real things. While I was in college, and definitely prior to that in middle and high school, I never understood why so much of my learning was about taking tests and writing papers that only teachers would see. It never seemed to make sense to me. I would take the test as seriously as I needed to in order to get the grade I wanted, and I didn't really care about my papers because I knew my teacher would read it and give me a grade. So, really, I did what I needed to do in many instances to get the grade. Sure, I had teachers I admired, and I would work a little harder to impress them, but that only goes so far as well.

Then I started writing for the student newspaper, The Rocky Mountain Collegian at Colorado State. I cared about that because I was writing for people who would read it and get something out of it. That shaped my values as a teacher. So of course when I learned about Authentic Student Products/Authentic Assessment while I was earning my teacher's license, I latched onto it and it became my teaching compass, so to speak.

What this means to me is having students create products with the intention of creating a real presentation opportunity and audience. At Polaris Expeditionary Learning School, I led a poetry club and students wrote poems that we would then go to the Bean Cycle and read in poetry slams. We also created Zines and did all we could to advance our literacy while actually doing what language creation was meant to do: communicate with people. This was my first experience seeing how much students learned by doing something authentic.

So as a composition instructor and now as a TESOL teacher (is it redundant to say teacher since it is embedded in the acronym?) we create electronic portfolios and publish them on blogs. The idea here is to take what we do in the classroom anyway (write essays, for example) and shape them for audiences outside of the teacher. Of course the challenge is to assure that people read them, but I am certain that students think about their writing more as a communicative exercise than something I will grade.

Content Based Instruction 

For this e-portfolio, students also studied a common theme in all their skills classes. What this means is that students pick a topic for independent research in reading, write about it in writing and, for our purposes, make videos for speaking, and they obviously incorporate what they learn in grammar throughout. Our theme was innovation. What I did was introduce readings and model the research and writing process in class activities and assignments so they could "practice" the skills in a sort of laboratory. And then they did the same thing we did in class on individual topics that branched from the innovation theme.

Integrated Curriculum 

The idea here is that students can expand their background knowledge and gain specialized discursive language they will need as they advance their studies. So rather than learn a new topic for each class and create products that are separate from each other, they study topics and create products based on the one theme and can focus their efforts on their language acquisition.

Then students put it together as a portfolio that they communicate to an online readership. You will notice on these blogs that students offer vocabulary words that are essential to their topic and compiled an annotated bibliogrphy (part of reading class) wrote an in-depth process essay (part of writing) and make videos that introduced their topic to their blog readers (listening and speaking).

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I hope you enjoy reading through the students' work. I am proud of what we do and I hope you can offer some feedback and suggestions.