Why Sustained CBI?
I came to content-based language teaching as a possible solution to the problem of not understanding essays written in my native language. The essays I confronted were written by non-native speaker (NNS) graduate students at a prestigious urban university who had high TOEFL scores and were expected to perform alongside native speakers (NSs) in their graduate programs. And yet I could not follow their work. For the most part, these student-writers were not lacking in vocabulary or sentence-level accuracy, nor did they fail to use appropriate cohering devices. What they lacked was the way argumentation is made in English. For the purposes of this chapter, I mean “argumentation” in the broadest sense, “a coherent series of statements leading from a premise to a conclusion” and “the act or process of forming reasons and drawing conclusions, and applying them to a case in discussion” (Webster’s, 1989). Argumentation is involved in the range of academic/professional tasks, from lecture compr
