This is a brief summary of Tedick and Lyster chapter on Counterbalanced Instructions. If you want to know more check the book Scaffolding Language Development in Immersion and Dual Language Classrooms.

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CLIL was coined by Marsh in 1994. He noticed a political movement in Asia related to the learning of an additional language. The government implemented subject classes in English in their regular schools curriculum for half of school time. They imported foreign materials, ideias and textbooks. But students learned the other subjects using local materials, ideas and textbooks. It created two different worlds inside the same schools, and it failed.  Later on, Marsh got together with Do Coyle, Hood and an international group of teachers to study why learners were leaving school after eight years having classes in English and they could barely put a sentence together. They aimed at enhancing the teaching of content, language and at the same time, they wanted students to have fun while at school. After investing on teacher's development, considering cultural aspects and choosing appropriate textbooks, it started to become successful in Europe. Furthermore, some classes that were delivered in the additional language, the focus was on content and the language was acquired in a more organic and natural way. The counterbalanced instruction and the CAPA Model (See the CAPA Model page) were brought by Tedick and Lyster to bring a stronger integration of the additional language to the content. Notice that their proposal brings intentionality to the language learning process.

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Adapted from David Marsh on CLIL - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Czdg8-6mJA Accessed on April 6th, 2022.

 

A counterbalanced approach intentionally draws attention to language in discourse contexts related to subject matter of literacy themes so that students engage with the form and functions of the language in contextualized and meaningful ways. This involves shifting students' attention between language and content.

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This interplay between language and content is achieved by attributing complementary status to both language and content objectives in ImDl (Immersion Dual Language) curriculum. Counterbalanced instruction does not mean, however, that there is an equal or balanced focus on language and content. Counterbalanced entails an ongoing shift in emphasis to prevent either language or content from taking on a disproportionate role in the ImDL curriculum that eclipses the importance of the other. 

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• "Having to process language for meaning does not always require precise syntactic and morphological knowledge. In such cases, students are able to skip grammatical information, as they focus mainly on key vocabulary items and draw on their contextual knowledge to understand meaning." (Cameron, 2001; Harley, 1993;Skehan, 1998; Swain, 1985, 1988)

• "Content teaching on its own is not necessarily good language teaching because of their limited range of language forms and functions to which it exposes students." (Lyster & Rebuffot, 2002; Poirier & Lyster, 2014; Swain, 1985, 1988)

• Separating content and language, however, is now thought to "deprive students of opportunities to focus on specific features of language at the very moment when their motivation to learn them may be as its highest." (Lightbown, 2014)

• According to some classes observation in 1985, Swain noticed that the teaching of the subject did not necessarily demanded much student production and because of this, teachers tended to provide students with inconsistent feedback. These practices were strongly influenced by Krashen's (1985) ideas. Krashen said that it was not necessary any attention to language form when subject matter instructions was happening in the classroom. According to Krashen, comprehensible input was enough. Nowadays, there is empirical evidence and research showing that the exposure to comprehensible input alone is insufficient for continued L2 growth.

• Since, the early 1990s, L2 education theorists have stressed the importance of integrating form-oriented and meaning-oriented approaches to ensure continued development in the target language. (Long, 1991; Stern, 1990)

• Researches now agree that ImDl and other content-based programs need to be carefully planned from a language perspective.

• Day and Shapson (1996) observed many classes and concluded that instructional practices that emphasize discourse and the use of language as an instrument for learning have more to contribute to scaffolding language development than less interactive practices. 

• Referring to young students, we see that their instructional setting is meaning oriented. Students can understand content without focusing on precise syntactic and morphological knowledge of the additional language  (Swain, 1988). "Learners are driven to look for message in the input before they look at how the message is encoded linguistically." (Benati, 2013)

• ImDL and content teachers tend to encourage students to go for meaning given the nature of these programs. On the other hand, the purpose of counterbalanced instruction is to shift students' attention to language in the context of content instruction, when they wouldn't otherwise be attending to language, in order to strengthen their ability to more effectively engage with the language. 

• A reactive approach includes oral scaffolding techniques, such as questions and feedback in response to students' language production, that serve to support student participation while ensuring that classroom interaction is a key source for learning. It also includes in-the-moment strategies for drawing students' attention to language or getting them produce more extended discourse. A proactive approach involves pre-planned instruction designed intentionally to highlight connections between subject-matter content and the language needed to engage with that content. They are complementary (Shapson, 1996)

• It is important  for teachers to plan language before. In class, it is also important to take advantage of the opportunities that teachers can provide students with moments to enhance language learning.

• Some professional trainings can have led teachers to expect language to emerge incidentally. Counterbalanced instructions is here to help teachers face these challenges, encouraging an intentional practice which integrates content and language in the classroom. 

• Skill acquisition theory is described as inter-related development of mental representations stored in memory and the processing mechanisms that access those representations. So, acquiring a complex skills entails the development of declarative and procedural knowledge. When developing L2, a gradual transition from effortful use that relies on declarative knowledge to more automatic use of the language that relies on declarative knowledge is needed to be planned. 

• Declarative and procedural knowledge  help us understand students' interlanguage development and the plateau effects featured by "fossilized" forms. Johnson (1996) stated that naturalistic approaches, such as ImDL, go straight to the procedural aspects of the language, they bypass the development of the declarative knowledge.  Johnson (1996) said that the interlanguage representations that are proceduralized early on "quickly become highly automatized and impermeable to change." (see also McLaughin, 1987)

• For Tedick and Lyster, fossilized language is not capable of changing or developing and it is very early to say that young ImDL learners will not be able to change or develop language because they are still learning. The authors consider that interlanguage can change, develop, be restructured as a result of a well-planned instructional support. 

• Young learners in ImDL classrooms are known to make use of their implicit knowledge of the additional language  in the form of formulaic "chunks" or prefabricated routines (Bjorklund, Mard-Miettinen &Savijarvi, 2014; Weber & Tardif, 1991).

• Formulaic language is "stored and retrieved from memory at the time of use, rather than being subject to generation or analysis by the language grammar." (Wray, 2002)

• "It can be said that the success of ImDL and content-based programs lies in young learners' predisposition for internalizing a great deal of the language to which they are exposed without having to stop and analyze it." (Tedick & Lyster, 2020)

• According to Tedick and Lyster (2020), because young learners are able to  learn in an implicit way and they are also able to internalize formulaic chunks of language, teacher do not need to avoid language that they are not aware of the way some structures work. So, teachers do not need to avoid the use of structures based on the premise that students will not understand because they haven't studied them yet. Teachers don't need to expect students to avoid the use of some structures, again because they haven't studied them. It happens because they are able to use forms without explicit knowledge by drawing on unanalyzed chunks stored in memory. 

• Counterbalanced instruction creates opportunities for students in the context of content-based or meaning-oriented tasks to notice and use various features of L2 that might otherwise be misused, unused, or unnoticed in classroom discourse. So, it is different from traditional language teaching approaches that focuses on decontextualized language to facilitate analysis of its mechanical workings.

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TEDICK,D. LYSTER,R. Scaffolding language development in Immersion and Dual Language Classrooms. Routledge. 2020.