Topics 2
Environmental education and language instruction
CBI :
Content-based instruction (CBI) is well respected not only for its commitment to language learning, but also for its dedication to content learning. CBI, generally, helps students develop both language and content knowledge, thus eliminating the typical separation between language and subject matter classes.
Understanding the need for environmental education:
Themes such as global warming, deforestation, and water pollution are regularly featured in the news, thereby raising our awareness of the troubled state of Mother Earth. When educational institutions—from elementary schools to university-based English foundation programs recognize the value of environmental education, language teachers will be in a unique position to promote environmental awareness while teaching English.
Role of The teacher:
English language teaching professionals have seen how English contributes to their students’ education, economic status, and competitiveness. We have also seen firsthand how globalization has made nations more interconnected and interdependent.
Levels of Environmental education:
(1) environmental awareness—that is, general familiarity with environmental issues.
(2) personal conduct knowledge, which translates awareness into action to preserve the environment.
(3) environmental literacy, which enables students to learn underlying principles and gain skills for carrying out their own hands-on project.
The Resources :
Many language textbooks now include chapters on environmental topics. Furthermore, teachers can use the Internet, where available, to find environment-related resources that can be adapted to meet their students’ content- and language-learning needs.
Classroom Activities:
• Activity No. 1 involves a classroom scavenger hunt, during which students practice reading and speaking while learning about a variety of environmental topics.
• Activity No. 2 highlights a group paragraph-writing task that recycles
green content introduced through reading and/or listening activities.
• Activity No. 3 revolves around a song that reinforces the importance of the three “Rs”: Reduce- Reuse-Recycle.
Discrete skills instruction:
Brown suggests integrating simple facts about the environment into exercises that focus on:
1-Imperatives (e.g., Don’t waste water).
2-Verb tenses (e.g., Polluted rivers are making people sick)
3- Wh– questions (e.g., What happens to our trash?).
4-Environmental texts can be downloaded from websites.
Integrated-skills instruction through project work:
Environmental awareness can be raised and language skills improved when students engage in process- and product-oriented projects that oblige skill integration and connections between what students are learning in the classroom and their lives outside of it (Jacobs 1993). Environmental topics can come to life through reading and writing projects that involve:
(1) researching topics of interest and writing academic papers;
(2) writing and illustrating children’s books or comic strips;
(3) creating posters, brochures, or bulletin board displays.
(4) writing stories or opinion pieces for the school newspaper.
Additionally, listening and speaking projects may involve students in debating an important environmental topic, giving a persuasive presentation that encourages classmates to engage in more earth friendly habits, and engaging in role plays that explore provocative environmental topics.
Promoting personal responsibility:
Teachers can organize field trips to local recycling centers, if they exist, to learn how important recycling is, how the process works, and what items can and cannot be recycled.
Conclusion:
Language teachers have many opportunities to heighten students’ awareness about the environmental problems plaguing the planet while remaining committed to improving students’ English skills. In addition to supporting meaningful language instruction, such theme-based instruction encourages students to think critically, provides them with real world knowledge, increases motivation, and promotes learner autonomy.
Feedback:
Environmental education is greatly needed in active learning. The teacher should bring the learner's environment to the classroom so as to bring life to the theoretical text which students learn. Learners must listen, see, touch, hear, deal with and apply what they learn. I call for teaching learners to learn how to implement the process of learning inside and outside classroom. Ex: It is lovely if the learner went home and communicated with or greeted his parents, made suggestions and offers to them in English.
Environment can be brought to the classroom as real things or realia to be used as teaching aids. The teacher can take his learners to the real scene of the lesson in life. This is called teaching through using environment directly. Environment can be brought to the classroom through using charts, cards, drawings, paintings, miming, acting, playing roles, story theater and video tapes or CDs. This is called teaching through using environment indirectly.
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