Content-based teaching in EFL setting

As Dr. Smidt had us watch a short clip about the SIOP method and raised a short discussion about content-based instruction in class last week, i have been thinking a lot about this instruction type and its feasibility in my future teaching context.

Personally i have never officially had any experience with this method when learning English. However, in high school i had seen some of my French-major friends learn Mathematics and Physics in French and the results of this were fantastic. Not only could those friends of mine communicate fluently in French but some of them even passed the entrance exam to get admitted to universities in France thanks to their good command of the Mathematics and Physics knowledge. When i asked those friends how it felt to study a subject matter in a foreign language, many answered it was hard at first when they need to transfer technical terms they already know to another language, but as time went by they got addicted to the subject and almost forgot about the language, which had then become an instrument for them to study the subject matter. And at the end of the learning process they achieved a fruitful outcome in both the use of language and the mastery of the subject matter.

This, in my opinion, is a good example of the bright side of using content-based instruction (CBI) in second/foreign language teaching. One thing should be taken into consideration, though, is that those friends of mine had already reached a relatively high proficiency level in French when they were exposed to this teaching method. Therefore, the use of CBI in second language teaching is, as far as i am concerned, should be implemented only to students at an approriate proficiency level. It would do no good if students are made to perform tasks that are far beyond their ability and find themselves get stuck in both learning the language and acquiring the subject matter.

Also, in the EFL setting where students normally have very few chances to use the target language outside the classroom, I think it is really difficult to implement content-based instruction. More specifically, in my future teaching context (middle/high schools in Vietnam), students have to work very hard to achieve good scores in mainstream subjects such as Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Literature, History etc. It would therefore be a double burden if they have to deal with these subject matters in English classes. As a result, i am thinking that it might work if CBI is used at some point in the teaching of reading or writing skills in the EFL classroom, in which teachers direct students' attention to the reading and writing material rather than the language itself. One example of this is the creative writing task in which students' work is to produce a short story, poem or a work of art in English.