Abstract:

There is a widely accepted consensus about the importance of learning foreign languages. In the European Union, studying languages is indispensable especially considering the European accession. Therefore, the existing teaching technologies of foreign languages should target vital skills. In my paper, I find answers to several important educational questions regarding language teaching. What possible benefits and drawbacks can be derived from teaching a compulsory subject in a foreign language? How can we preserve the effectiveness of our educational goals in bilingual education? What sort of cognitive fields can be improved with the method of Content Based Instruction (CBI)? What advantages and disadvantages do bilingual students have during their bilingual studies? How can successful CBI be tested in sciences? I introduce Content-Based Instruction first in general, as one of the possible ways of teaching a second language. Secondly, I examine the selection procedures for studying different subjects in a foreign language. Afterwards, I analyze a questionnaire with the participation of 54 students about their bilingual science studies. Finally I prove that the double imprinting of the factual information means that the knowledge can be used easier in practice than studying this teaching matter in one's mother tongue only. This verification is based on a comparison of the effectiveness within a given chapter of a secondary school biology subject between bilingual and monolingual classes. Worth noting here are four findings from different research in the field of educational and cognitive psychology that also justify the results of this test-comparison: 1. Thematically organized materials, typical of content-based classrooms, are easier to remember and learn (Singer, 1990). 2. The presentation of coherent and meaningful information, characteristic of well-organized content-based curricula, leads to deeper processing and better learning (Anderson, 1990). 3. There is a relationship between student motivation and student interest (common outcomes of content-based classes), and the student’s ability to process challenging materials, recall information, and elaborate (Alexander, Kulikowich, and Jetton 1994). 4. Expertise in a topic develops when learners reinvest their knowledge in a sequence of progressively more complex tasks, feasible in content-based classrooms and usually absent from more traditional language classrooms because of the narrow focus on language rules or limited time on superficially developed and disparate topics (e.g., a curriculum based on a short reading passage on the skyscrapers of New York, followed by a passage on the history of bubble gum, later followed by an essay on the volcanoes of the American Northwest (Bereiter and Scardamalia, 1993)). Finally, I make a conclusion that classroom management, a well-designed syllabus and the carefully selected methodology can determine efficiency and can help students concentrate on the logical core and the sequence of the teaching matter.

Keywords:

Successful teaching, Content Based Instruction, Language teaching, Teaching of Technical Terms, double imprinting.