I think interdisciplinary content should be always included in Second and Foreign Language Learning.
Language is the key to understand the social world. Most social life is conducted through language. Language is a social phenomenon shared by members of a social group. Culture is the way of life of its members, the collection of ideas, concepts, habits which the members of a society learn, share, and transmit from generation to generation.
Culture includes the language of a society. Culture is passed on to children to socialization being the language an important mean to do so.
Culture, in formal education, is socialized through the curriculum.
Curriculum ca be defined as a social text which specifies the pedagogical intervention of educators. It requires the specification of aims, goals and objectives as well as the selection of contents considered socially valid for a definited society.
Thus, the educative task is carried out through a selection, organization, critical analysis, reconstruction, beliefs, values, habits and skills as a consequence of a sociohistorical development of a determined society.
The selected contents which are accepted as socially valuable are grouped by separated school subjects such as Language, Geography, History, Biology among others.
Contents are generally compartmentalized. As a result, Language is usually taught following the order of acquisition. The acquisition is often seen as a process of accumulating linguistic structures, analogous to building a wall placing one brick over another.
The focus is placed on different aspects of language learning, the macro skills grammar vocabulary, pronunciation and topics through everyday situations which undoubtedly facilitate understanding and interaction.
However, this way of teaching could be enriched with texts dealing with specific topics such as Biology, Geography, History and other school knowledge.
Children encounter school subjects combined in the real world so texts should deal with cross curricular and cultural topics letting the internalization of new concepts, combining what the learner already knows and understands to produce a more generalizable higher skill.
Learners know a lot of specific vocabulary from different school subject which are generally transparent words since they come from Latin.
The use of cognate reinforces the concepts acquired in other fields, and let the students read texts from science, technology and business.
Reading this kind of texts offers self esteem and self confidence due to the fact that students become more independent.
Interdisciplinary content lets students develop the second language acquisition and subject area skills simultaineously.
This different approach motivates students to learn, experiecing the language as a window to enrich their personal growth.
Learning a foreign language is a part of the broader educational goal of learning: to read the world.
