View Content #23816

In today's Topic of the Week article, James P. Lantolf summarizes the most important principles and procedures in Concept-Based Language Instruction (CBLI). In addtion to reading the book, Sociocultural theory and the pedagogical imperative, which includes overviews of classroom studies, teachers can learn more on the Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research (CALPER) website dedicated to CBLI. Of special note is a series of slides, Integrating Explicit Knowledge into the Second Language Classroom through Concept-based Language Instruction, that introduces interested teachers to some background on CBLI. The slides present background on the foundations of CBLI and then give overviews of several language-specific studies. The first deals with temporal aspect in Spanish, which includes the selection of preterite or imperfect verb forms. The second deals with phrasal verbs in English, and the third deals with English collocations with make, do, take, give, and have. The fourth deals with sarcasm in English, the fifth deals with topicalization in Chinese, the sixth deals with pragmatics in French such as the tu / vous distinction, and the seventh deals with the concept of boundedness and the usage of ser and estar in Spanish. You can access the slides here. 

Be sure to explore all of CALPER's resources relating to CBLI at http://calper.la.psu.edu/content/concept-based-language-instruction-cbli.