Students need to transfer their ESL skills to their academic subjects or careers. Unfortunately, this process does not always occur. Students who do well in the controlled environment of a high-level ESL class may not be able to make the final leap to a regular class:

"It appears that being involved as a student in an L2 classroom does not automatically lead to motivation to transfer L2 beyond that classroom," Mark Andrew James wrote.

By teaching ESL through content-area materials, the instructor can help students make this transfer. In a content ESL class, the teacher uses a non-ESL book or curriculum for the class — civics, literature or science, for example.

Rather than writing all new material, the instructor may choose to modify what is already available by reworking the textbook lessons into a format that stimulates language acquisition and provides incentive in the classroom. The instructor needs to provide plenty of language material at a high interest level to enhance language acquisition.

Rather than just learning about grammar or words, a class will actually use the language to learn new material. They learn how to apply their language skills in a real academic context. This approach will help the learners bridge the gap to the improved linguistic competence and communication that are prerequisites to further study in regular school or college subjects.

Note the ACTFL Standards on Communication:

Interpersonal communication: Learners interact and negotiate meaning in spoken, signed or written conversations to share information, reactions, feelings and opinions.

Interpretive communication: Learners understand, interpret and analyze what is heard, read or viewed on a variety of topics.

Presentational communication: Learners present information, concepts and ideas to inform, explain, persuade and narrate on a variety of topics using appropriate media and adapting to various audiences of listeners, readers or viewers.

The content-area course material should be authentic taken from the subject matter. Students use English as a tool to learn new information they are interested in, and that fits the goals of the academic program while providing a positive language learning experience.

Content ESL classes provide ESL learners with real information while they study an interesting subject. These are real subject-matter classes with the focus and the tests on academic materials. They are not selections from textbooks introduced as part of a language class.

With the readings, lectures and writing assignments all on a given topic or on a single literary author, the students have the advantage of a familiar extra-linguistic context and a vocabulary that repeats often enough that they do not have to spend as much time looking up new words than if they were working on a new topic or author each week.

Also content-based ESL programs connect the learners to relevant real material, which allows students to relate their language learning to the academic subjects they are studying or will be studying. In this case, the academic subject — history, for example — becomes the core of the ESL course.

Here is a quotation from an ESL learner who first learned English in isolation from real applications, according to teacher Gloria Park: "First, although learning in a one-pupil classroom gave me exposure to English language learning, English was not contextualized in that I never knew how to make connections between what I was learning in the ESL pullout program and what was happening in my mainstream content classes."

Programs providing content ESL often require that students understand a specific subject and perform specific tasks related to the subject, be it academic or job-related, such as business ESL: "Although ESL instruction has changed greatly in a short period of time, one thing that has remained the same is the need for effective lessons that help students develop skills they can use outside the classroom."

Students in ESL classes become proficient in language skills such as reading, writing and grammar, but they need to bridge to academic subjects. The development of academic language skills lags behind the social communicative skills stressed in regular ESL programs where the focus is general and not content-specific. The language of academic subjects is different from the language of everyday communication, and typical ESL drills and activities — particularly in the higher grades and at the college level — will not prepare students to do content work.

For minority language students, regular courses have additional language demands beyond the traditional ESL skills. Suddenly, they are faced with more cognitively demanding tasks that call for the use of language for higher-level reasoning and for integrative language skills to move from communicative competence to academic competence.

Students need to learn the academic language. They need to realize that much of their exam material will be drawn from lectures, thus listening and note-taking are essential academic skills that must be developed.

In short, students need to transfer their skills from one set of materials to another set, which can be academic, professional or real-life.

"Learning transfer is a fundamental goal of L2 education, reflecting a basic assumption that classroom learning should translate into real-world performance," James writes.

Do students make an effort to use what they have learned outside the classroom? Do they want to do so?

In ESL reading, for example, students are learning to read or improve existing reading skills. In an American history class, they are reading to learn. They are now using all their language skills to learn something new rather than just preparing for the next ESL test.