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Content-based: teaching english through social studies

Abstract:

Due to the importance of English Nowadays, it is our concern, as teachers, to look for different ways to teach this language. The gamma of methods to teach English is vast, but not everybody is conscious of the great importance and utility of this language, and one of the reasons why this happens might be because we have not been using a contextualized situation in which our students can clearly see that by learning this language they can access a world of opportunities. Therefore, context has become so important to make students realize those aspects that give a powerful reason to learn a second language. Our proposal called Content-Based approach combines the contents of a school subject with a foreign language. The purpose of this method is to give students a context to learn that language, and, at the same time, to reinforce the background knowledge on something that we all start acquiring when we are born. We consider that a Content-Based Curriculum can be really useful to teach English in our country. Although, there are a few schools in our city that use this method, the contents are a little bit de-contextualized because they use foreign textbooks with information and facts that are strange to us. Unlike this foreign proposal, we suggest a social studies Content-Based Syllabus, but starting in our surroundings, our own culture and traditions, and our own history