The Effect of Planning Lessons on the Amount of Speaking When Integrating Language and Content in Iranian Content-Based Courses

Abstract

While learners' ability to speak academic language develops over time in content-based programs, the development of their nonacademic language appears to lag behind. Students' speaking in content-based (CB) classrooms is confined to an academic discourse style. In the researchers' point of view, the gap of less amount of nonacademic speaking can be bridged by the application of the conceptual framework prepared by Snow, Met, and Genesee (1989). Planning lessons which integrate content-obligatory and content-compatible language can be a practical application for the theory proposed by these scholars. The present study reviews the result of research on planning lessons which include content-obligatory and content-compatible language in content-based courses, and it investigates the effect of such a kind of reflective lesson planning on the amount of students' speaking. The sample lesson plan in this article applies techniques to integrate content-obligatory and content-compatible language through task. To conduct this research, 20 students in a content-based class in Sama private middle school of Tabriz City were selected as the participants and were pre-tested. The participants received 42 hours of planned instruction including content-obligatory and content-compatible linguistic items. After 28 sessions, a post-test was given to the same participants. Through the analysis of the obtained data, <em>paired sample t-test, </em>it was found that there was a significant difference between students' speaking scores on pre-test and post-test. The findings lent support to the development of the quantity of students' speaking.