If the final expected outcome of education is a fully-functioning citizen, then deeper learning becomes essential. This kind of learning will only occur through a process of increasingly refining understanding, and this process requires communicating emerging understanding, and thus language. This means that any teacher who wants to facilitate deep learning needs to keep students’ language development in mind.
Teachers who teach through a foreign language, or an L2, normally have a heightened awareness of language and its role, and students who study through a foreign language are normally more prepared to focus on language too. Therefore, a subject taught in a foreign or second language may be the most natural and helpful context in which to initiate the awareness raising about the importance of language necessary to create opportunities for deep learning.