ABSTRACT
This chapter describes an integrated approach to foreign language (FL) instruction that aims to promote the concurrent development of language skills and content learning. The approach is assessment-driven by design with a focus on cognition. Within the general cognitive framework, the approach is grounded in the concept of reading to learn. As a multifaceted construct, reading to learn entails three mental operations, including text-meaning building, personal-meaning construction, and knowledge refinement. Since all these operations simultaneously involve language processing and conceptual manipulation, the construct allowed us to embed content learning in language skills training. From a methodological perspective, reading to learn is also ideal because it has been extensively studied in monolingual reading research. The solid databases available in the literature guided us in identifying and defining the requisite skills for the three reading to learn operations. This chapter presents a conceptual framework that explains what reading to learn entails, how it relates to language learning, and how explicit training on reading to learn skills could promote the concurrent development of language skills and content knowledge. The chapter also describes the approach and the project conducted to implement the approach.
