An Encounter with the Interdisciplinary Course

Question Answers

How do the texts for interdisciplinary readings support to enhance students’ language skills? Explain.

Helps in learning different discipline based vocabularies.
Improves the reading and comprehensive understanding.
Encourages critical thinking by combining the knowledge from multiple disciplines.
Enhances writing skills.
Supports discussion and speaking abilities.
Promotes cultural and contextual awareness

How far do you think the texts for interdisciplinary readings can be exploited to foster students’ critical thinking skills such as analyzing, synthesizing (combining) and interpreting? Illustrate your answer.

Analytical thinking: Interdisciplinary texts often involve complex ideas or issues and these bring students to break down arguments, identify beliefs, and evaluate evidences.
– ‘Climate Change’: views of scientists can be different to the speech of a politician on the same issue. How arguments are structured can be learnt.
Synthesis of ideas: Knowledge collected from various sectors can be used to explain different viewpoints to understand the topic.
– Reading a story based on war and a news article on modern conflicts helps us to combine emotional, historical and factual viewpoints to understand human situations.
Interpreting: Texts from philosophy, art, culture requires students to interpret symbolic meanings, figurative language, or multiple layers of meaning. So interdisciplinary texts enhance interpreting ability in students.
– Krishnamurti’s journal – we shouldn’t fill our minds with the rocks and clouds of the earth. Comparison of thought with the pond. (explain yourself)

Describe the need of the interdisciplinary course in the present context of English language teaching and learning.

Connects the language learning with real life.
To develop critical thinking, creativity in students and teachers.
Makes English relevant to diverse fields.
Encourages critical awareness of social issues.
Enhances motivation and engagements as interdisciplinary courses are relevant to students’ lives.
Promotes inclusive and holistic education.
To improve communication skills

What do we teach (i.e. language skills, contents, or both) by exploiting the texts that the interdisciplinary course can encompass? Give reasons to justify your answer.

We teach both language skills and content by exploiting the texts that the interdisciplinary course can encompass.

Language skills development:
– Students improve reading comprehension (understanding) through different texts.
– writing gets improved through summary, argument based texts, and students can write in fluency, structure using advanced vocabularies
– listening and speaking get improved through discussions, debates, and presentations
Content knowledge acquisition:
– students can learn concepts of environmental issues, ethical debates, scientific discoveries while practicing English.
– it can aware the learners to choose their career paths as there is a chance that students may get interests over the different sectors; tourism, health, it, education etc.

Integration of both is important and essential. Thus, an interdisciplinary course enriches both language proficiency and content understanding, making English teaching more effective, relevant, and holistic; especially in a multilingual, developing context like Nepal.

In what way is interdisciplinarity different from disciplinary and multidisciplinary? Distinguish.

Aspect	Disciplinary	Multidisciplinary	Interdisciplinary
1. Focus	One subject only	Multiple subjects studied separately	Subjects combined and connected
2. Learning style	Deep focus on one area	Parallel learning of different areas	Integration of ideas from different areas
3. Knowledge use	Subject – specific knowledge	Knowledge stays in each subject	Knowledge is mixed to understand a bigger picture
4. Purpose	Mastery in one subject	Exposure to many fields	Solving real-world problems using ideas from many subjects
5. Teaching method	Single subject teaching	Separate teachers for separate subjects	Teachers or learners link ideas across fields
6. Students’ role	Learn deeply in one subject	Learn content from many subjects	Connect and apply ideas across subjects
7. Example	Studying only English grammar	Studying English, Science, and History separately	Reading an article about climate change (Language + Science + Society)

Critically examine the use of the interdisciplinary course in a language syllabus.

It makes learning more meaningful: A text about pollution teach vocabulary, grammar, as well as raise awareness about environmental problems.
It improves thinking skills: Reading about gender equality improves reading skills and critical thinking
Prepares students for real life: English becomes more useful when students learn how it works in different areas like science, tourism, or media. Reading a dialogue on tourism also helps to speak in real life.
Supports holistic education: Interdisciplinary courses help students to grow in many ways like; language, values (moral), and life skills.
On the other hand interdisciplinary courses can be challenging for teachers that they may feel uncomfortable teaching other contexts in English classroom. So while selecting the texts for the syllabus we shouldn’t put the hard and unfamiliar contents because students can lose their interest.