Kathleen Corrales

PARTICIPANTS
The class under study was composed of 16 uni-
versity students between the ages of 17 and 22 
from various semesters in their academic medical 
program. This means that some students had 
already studied some of the content that would 
be covered in this course in spanish and others 
had not. Initially, a background survey was applied 
to obtain data on the learners’ English-language 
experience. From this information, we selected 
the four members of the class for our focus 
group, two males (
AK
and 
KR
) and two females 
(
MJ
and 
ML
). The researchers choose one “highly 
proficient” student, one “middle-level” student, 
and two “low” students. only these students 
participated in semi-structured interviews carried 
out at the end of the semester. 
DATA COLLECTION
once a month during the semester, the partici-
pants were asked to complete a learning journal 
during the last 15-minutes of their class session. 
Instead of having students write in an open-

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Z o N A P R ó x I M A N º 15 (2011) Págs. 40-53
45
Student perceptions on how content based instruction supports
learner development in a foreign language context 
forum diary, we decided to apply five learning 
journals throughout the semester with four or 
five questions on each. students were asked to 
write their responses in spanish in order to have 
the most detailed information possible, but some 
decided to answer in English. Because it was 
the first time the students ever used this type of 
data collection tool, we decided to use the first 
journal as a pilot. Thus, the information reported 
in this study is taken from journals two through 
five. Because of attendance issues, we had the 
following number of participants for each journal: 
Journal two—13 participants, Journal three—16