A holistic approach to college ESL: integrating language and content

Although several curricular models have emerged at the post-secondary level to integrate language and content and, thereby, facilitate students' transition from ESL to mainstream college courses, some programmes still rely on a skills model to develop students' proficiencies. The skills model is inadequate for a number of reasons: it deprives students of the linguistic and intellectual immersion necessary for language acquisition and cognitive development to take place, and it particularly hampers refugee and immigrant students—whose secondary, English-medium schooling may have been poor—from developing the deep literacy on which their academic success depends. Only a content-oriented curriculum can meet these needs. A whole language approach—text-based and student-centred—is offered as a viable alternative to various models, both traditional and new. What the whole language model is, how it works in the classroom, and what its benefits are form the focus of this paper.