Teaching secondary
school aged students

Curriculum Links

What and Why?

One of the main features of CES is that it makes direct links between English language learning and the school curriculum. This happens in two ways. Firstly, there are links with broader educational aims, such as developing problem solving abilities, autonomy, questioning, cooperative learning, and so on. Secondly, there are direct links with school subjects, such as science, geography, language and so on. There are a number of reasons why this is important. Language teaching is a part of education, and needs to take its full educational responsibility. A cross-curricular approach also offers students an ideal opportunity to refresh and revise what they have done in other subject areas and to make links with what they have learned so that their knowledge becomes more active. This makes both learning and teaching English more interesting and more memorable. Working with subject knowledge that is important and interesting in its own right makes it more likely that students will remember the language associated with it. Finally, whether language teaching has explicit links with the curriculum or not, it is clear that it can have a role in shaping the broader attitudes and abilities of students. It thus makes sense to take this fact into account and build it into our language teaching methodology.

Practical ideas

• Teaching English through a cross-curricular approach can mean that your role as a teacher changes. Many teachers report that cross-curricular teaching is more interesting, since it involves their learning as well. However, you are an English teacher and you cannot be expected to know all about science, geography and so on. Your role as a teacher, then, is to stimulate the students to find the information/answers/explanations that they require for themselves.
• In the notes to the units, you will find some background information on some of the topics covered in CES.
• You may find it useful to talk to teachers of other subject areas. As you approach a new theme, you could find out what work the students will do or have done in that area.
• It may be possible to teach some lessons together with another subject teacher. For example, with some advance preparation, students could do science experiments, maths, physical education and so on in English. You could choose a new topic area together.
• As you begin a new theme, you could start with a question poster. You can ask the students questions such as: What questions from history connect to this? How does Geography connect to this? Is Maths important for this topic? How? and so on.