Skills Development in 'Sustained' Content-Based Curricula: Case Studies in Analytical/Critical Thinking and Academic Writing

After suggesting a framework for the analytical/critical thinking skills needed in academic/professional work, this article describes a pedagogical approach to guide ESL/EFL students to those skills and observes its effects in case studies from 1998–99. The approach, Sustained Content-Based Instruction (CBI), suggests that students learn analytical/critical thinking skills when they confront actual academic/professional tasks in which skills are modelled, explained and practised. As these skills include the synthesis, comparison and challenging of sources as well as learning appropriate rhetoricalconventions, they arebest learnedwhen students study a subject over time in language classes that simulate university courses. The case studies involve 13 students from the Americas, Africa, Asia and Europe in eight classes at two four-year institutions. Student work examined includes summaries, papers, research charts and exercises that guide students to questioning texts. The findings here suggest benefits from sustained CBI. Papers by lower level students who had sustained CBI showed stronger argumentation than papers by advanced students who had not. The accretion of information in sustained CBI helped students question texts and support their challenges. Students were better able to synthesise sources, categorising information from many texts which in turn helped them discover their own views, support them, and note where more research is needed.