At one point it seemed that the tendency in education was to subdivide fields into ever narrower subjects. They actually did it Ecuador in some schools with EFL, so the kids had a course called "Reading & Writing" which would be separate from another course on "Grammar" taught by a completely different teacher with different books.
Coursebooks used to be written with very little unity as well. The unit would very often have a title such as "Around the World" but the reading and listening texts would only tangentially touch the theme while the grammar exercises would ignore it completely.
Currently it seems that some people are trying to steer the trend in the opposite direction. Now the idea of cross-curricular unity, and the idea of having a learning axis is coming back into fashion (at least here).
It is said that there is no unemployment in Azeroth (the fictional world of World of Warcraft) and this is because the player always has clear goals to work towards. In its simplest form, the idea resembles Super Mario Bros, where the aim is to keep Mario moving to the right in order to eventually arrive at the castle.
The idea of the Missions and Quests that were are designing for the EFL classes at UDLH is to use the Missions as a goal using all of the knowledge and skills acquired in the Quests. We are a long way from doing it perfectly, but in my humble opinon, we are getting better with each passing term. We are trying to make the "quests" in the form of readings, videos, essays, grammar points and vocabulary all lead to information that will help the student finally complete the mission.
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