Documenting language and content integrated learning: a case study of a genre-based history in films course

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we explore how advanced college students use the past history and experiences of others to understand the present while learning a foreign language through a content-integrated curriculum. To assess student learning we operationalize Norris (2006. “The Why (and How) of Assessing Student Learning Outcomes in College Foreign Language Programs.” The Modern Language Journal 90 (4): 576–583) learning outcomes model (content, skills and dispositions) through linguistic indices. The learning is documented throughout a semester via learners’ written production, comparing the changes and expansion in the use of meaning-making resources that demonstrate their understanding of others through choices in the wording, logical organization of texts, and their positioning in relation to those contents. The participants have varied language trajectories ranging from heritage to L2 language learners of Spanish. The findings show how a content and language integrated curriculum focusing on a historical theme (i.e. Southern Cone dictatorships) through a particular genre (i.e. film review) can reveal students’ content, skills and dispositions in an L2. Learners demonstrated their developing capacities in a foreign language and history through their production of written texts that allow them to use knowledge about the past to interpret the present via academic genres. The paper provides a framework for describing content, skills and dispositions learning outcomes with linguistic features that evidence the achievement of those outcomes.

KEYWORDS:

• Content-based L2 curriculum
• history in films
• academic genres
• learning outcomes

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the reviewers and editors of the special issue for their careful reading and suggestions. We are also grateful to Dick Tucker for his comments. All the problems and mistakes are responsibility of the authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The MLA (2007) report presents challenges and opportunities facing language study in higher education in the US and issued specific recommendations. One of the imperatives identified by the report was ‘the need to understand other cultures and languages’. Language is defined as a complex multifunctional phenomenon to link individuals, communities and cultures. Linguistic and cultural competence are necessary to understand other peoples and cultures and they are taught through critical engagement with literature, film and other media. According to the MLA (2007) report, curricular reform should place ‘language study in cultural, historical, geographic, and cross-cultural frames within the context of humanistic learning’ (238)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mariana Achugar

Mariana Achugar is a Guggenheim Fellow (2009) and a professor in the Department of Media and Languages at the Universidad de la República, Uruguay. Her applied linguistics research focuses on academic language development, disciplinary literacy in history and bilingual professional identity.

Therese Tardio

Therese Tardio is Associate Teaching Professor and Coordinator of the Hispanic Studies Program in the Department of Modern Language at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her current research project examines the narratives of survivors of gang rape and sexual violence in the Guatemalan and Salvadoran Civil Wars and the subsequent post-war period, through an analysis of testimonies, documentaries and human rights reports. She is author and lead content developer of Spanish Online, through the Open Learning Initiative, an online learning platform.