Stryker and Leaver (1993) state that there may be a challenge for learners to participate in CBI courses. CBI is in the “learning by doing” school of pedagogy. Learners are expected to be active in different roles and cooperative with each other. In addition, they need a commitment to learn language in CBI courses. This is an issue for students who are accustomed to whole-class, independent, and traditional learning and teaching models. Additionally, learners need to possess a minimum level of language proficiency so that they can understand the quantity of new information in CBI courses. Stryker and Leaver (1993) suggest that students need to be prepared both psychologically and cognitively for CBI, and if they are not adequately prepared, then teachers should offer the missing schemata needs for students. Or students need to be kept from enrolling in CBI courses until they are ready. In my opinion, I would suggest that teachers need to design a lesson that is intriguing and appealing enough to encourage students to participate in the lesson. Moreover, teachers must know how to shelter the content to make it accessible to students.
Another issue is that language teachers have been trained to teach linguistic knowledge rather than a content subject. Hence, language teachers “may be insufficiently grounded to teach subject matters.” (Richards & Rodgers, 2001, p.220). Indeed, language teachers have not been trained to teach content subjects, and may be questioned about their credibility in CBI courses. From my perspective, I would say that language teachers can ask for assistance from content teachers. Additionally, language teachers can choose a content subject that they are familiar with to instruct. Do not try to teach all subject matters, that is, language teachers should start small. Finally, language teachers can attend professional development workshops to let themselves have second, third, or even fourth profession.
Another problem associated with CBI is that language teachers are too concerned with content area teaching and neglect teaching related language skills. Language teachers seem to forget the main purpose of CBI is to enhance language development though content areas rather than content learning per se. If language components are missing, it can not be called CBI. The language learning aspect should have equal priority with the content learning facet in CBI (Cristopher, 1996).