A Qualitative Study Of CBI's Application To Subject Teaching

CBI (Content-based Second Language Instruction) is a kind of second teaching idea introduced abroad in the last two decades. It argues that the teaching of other subjects through second language can enhance student's certain second language abilities. During this particular process, the academic objectives and the language ones interact and thus to achieve a win-win situation. With the trend in younger age of Chinese learning, many public high schools in big cities of China are keen to set up their international departments to welcome foreign students. However, the relevant theories and practices of this particular running mode have reach far from satisfactory in the academic community. Here this paper tries to take CBI as a reference, analyze the pros and cons of CBI geography teaching and concludes various influence factors from both subject and language sides.The whole research includes three stages, which is data collection, field research and writing. During the field research from April 2010 to January 2011, the geography course of the international department of Shanghai Foreign Language School was selected as the main object of study and qualitative research method was applied. Great amount of first hand material was gained though interviews of school manager, teachers and students, classroom observation and so on, which provide a solid foundation to factors analysis and teaching suggestions in the paper.The paper is divided into three parts:introduction, the qualitative research of CBI geography teaching, results and discussion. The first part and the current situation description in the second part act as the theoretical and practical basis of the paper. While the CBI geography teaching in the second part, as well as the third part enjoys the main body. Based on the study of geography teaching, the author first discussed three areas of subject learning: theme setting, content setting and understanding promotion, and then discussed several factors related to language acquisition such as language ability and fundamentals. Besides, other factors concerned with learning attitude, cultural psychology were also mentioned. All these points have been given positive comments as well as critiques, and practical personal suggestions have been provided to certain problems.The author wish the paper could lead to further thoughts to language and subjects teaching problems in international departments and provide reference to subject teachers there.