Counter-Balancing Between Content-Based Instruction And Form-Focused Instruction With Perspectives From Early Immersion Teaching Of The Chinese Language In The United States

Language learning and subject matter or content learning have long been deemed to be totally separate and unrelated. It was not until the early1980s that coordinating the learning of language and subject matter or content started to receive continuous attention in the field of second language research. In the field of instructed Second Language Acquisition, Content-Based Instruction has received much attention in that it integrates both cognitive development and language development. Content-based instruction comes in different shapes and sizes, one of which is immersion education. Immersion education refers to additive bilingual programs designed for majority-language speakers in which at least half of their subject-matter instruction is in a language that they are learning as a second or foreign language; they also receive some instruction through a shared first language, which normally has majority status in the community.Immersion education has been very successful and widely adopted on the globe because immersion students who study subject matter through their second language attain the same levels of academic achievement and first language development as non-immersion students, and they attain significantly higher levels of second language proficiency than do non-immersion students studying the second language as a regular subject for one lesson per day. However, immersion students’second language development, especially their second language accuracy, is not so satisfying as that they have achieved academically. Consequently, Form-Focused Instruction is called for to enhance language teaching while content teaching.This thesis first reviews relative studies on both content-based instruction and form-focused instruction in the field of second language acquisition. Then it focuses on how language is processed through content, drawing examples from early immersion teaching of the Chinese language. The next part will center on negotiation in which the teacher provide scaffolds and feedback to facilitate learners’comprehension of content and improvement of their target language, namely Chinese under this context.The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one makes a brief introduction to the whole thesis, in which the background of the study, purpose and significance of the study are respectively provided. Chapter two makes an overview of the studies pertaining to content-based instruction and form-focused instruction. Additionally, a brief review of some previous studies, which are outstanding and most relevant to the present research, is also provided. Chapter three deals with how to process the Chinese language through content in the early immersion setting by means of comprehension, awareness, and production activities. Chapter four lists student errors from early immersion teaching of the Chinese language, and the reasons for the errors will be investigated. What is more, this chapter will focus on how teachers will negotiate the Chinese language through content by means of interactional strategies that involve teacher scaffolding and feedback. The last chapter, chapter five, serves as the conclusion of the thesis, major findings, implications and limitations of the study are illuminated.