Curriculum Material and Development

Curriculum Material and Development

A syllabus is a specification of the content of a course of instruction and lists what will be taught and tested.

Syllabus design is the process of developing a syllabus.

Curriculum development is a more comprehensive process than syllabus design. It includes the processes that are used to determine the needs of a group of learners, to develop aims or objectives for a program to address those needs, to determine an appropriate syllabus, course structure, teaching methods, and materials, and to carry out an evaluation of the language program that results from these processes.

Language curriculum development deals with the following questions:

1. What procedures can be used to determine the content of a language program?
2. What are learners’ needs?
3. How can learners’ needs be determined?
4. What contextual factors need to be considered in planning a language program?
5. What is the nature of aims and objectives in teaching and how can these be developed?
6. What factors are involved in planning the syllabus and the units of organization in a course?
7. How can good teaching be provided in a program?
8. What issues are involved in selecting, adapting, and designing instructional materials?
9. How can one measure the effectiveness of a language program?

Synthetic syllabuses

In synthetic syllabuses, the content of instruction is organized in terms of the target language's grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary, etc. This content is pre-selected and taught incrementally until the whole language is covered. The learners' task is to "re-synthesize the language that has been broken down into a large number of small pieces with the aim of making this learning task easier"

The structural syllabus

The structural syllabus is the best known example of a synthetic syllabus. The content to be taught is analyzed in linguistic terms - that is, teaching units focus on a particular point of grammar or pronunciation plus associated vocabulary.

The notional-functional syllabus

notions and functions are still linguistic units of analysis. And using pre-selected linguistic units and linguistic criteria to select, grade and sequence pedagogical content leads us back to synthetic syllabus design solutions.

Analytic Syllabuses

• In analytic syllabuses, learning is organized in terms of the social purposes that learners have for learning the target language. This suggests that learners must interact with and analyze samples of language that are relevant to their needs.
• analytic syllabuses are those that present the target language whole chunks at a time

Analytic syllabuses

Analytic syllabuses rely on "learners' presumed ability to perceive regularities in the input"

Krashen and the Monitor Theory

• One of the central tenets of this theory is known as the "comprehensible input" hypothesis.

• This hypothesis states that learners acquire grammar and vocabulary by getting and understanding language that is slightly beyond their current level of competence.

 

Comprehensible input

Two central questions must be answered about comprehensible input.

• First, how do learners get the right kind of input?

• Second, does providing comprehensible input guarantee that learners will learn the language they are exposed to?

What are tasks?

• a piece of work undertaken for oneself or for others, freely or for some reward. Thus, examples of tasks include painting a fence, dressing a child, filling out a form, buying a pair of shoes, making an airline reservation, borrowing a library book. In other words, by "task" is meant the hundred and one things people do in everyday life, at work, at play, and in between.a piece of work or an activity, usually with a specified objective, undertaken as part of an educational course, or at work (Crookes, 1986:1).

• an activity which require[s] learners to arrive at an outcome from given information through some process of thought, and which allow[s] teachers to control and regulate that process (Prabhu, 1987:24).

• a piece of work or an activity, usually with a specified objective, undertaken as part of an educational course, or at work (Crookes, 1986:1).

• an activity which require[s] learners to arrive at an outcome from given information through some process of thought, and which allow[s] teachers to control and regulate that process (Prabhu, 1987:24).

• any classroom work which involves learners in comprehending, manipulating, producing or interacting in the target language while their attention is principally focused on meaning rather than form. The task should also have a sense of completeness, being able to stand alone as a communicative act in its own right (Nunan, 1993:59).

• any structural language learning endeavor which has a particular objective, appropriate content, a specified working procedure, and a range of outcomes for those who undertake the task. "Task" is therefore assumed to refer to a range of workplans which have the overall purpose of facilitating language learning - from the simple and brief exercise type, to more complex and lengthy activities such as group problem-solving or simulations and decision-making (Breen, 1987:23).

• one of a set of differentiated, sequenceable, problem-solving activities involving learners and teachers in some joint selection from a range of varied cognitive and communicative procedures applied to existing and new knowledge in the collective exploration and pursuance of foreseen or emergent goals within a social milieu. (Candlin, 1987:10).

Kinds of Cognitive Tasks according to Prabhu

• opinion-gap,

• information-transfer, and

• reasoning-gap tasks

What is TBLT?

an analytic approach to syllabus design and methodology in which chains of information-gathering, problem-solving and evaluative tasks are used to organize language teaching and learning; these interdependent pedagogical tasks, which combine insights from sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic research, are designed to methodologically simulate the communicative events which learners encounter in specific second language-using environments (Markee, 1994a).

The process syllabus

• It does not pre-select the linguistic content of instruction. Instead, it typically depends on the use of problem-solving tasks to organize instruction.

• The process syllabus is situated within a curricular approach to organizing language instruction.

• In its strong form at least, not only the content but the materials, methodology and types of assessment used in a course are not pre-determined.

Different types of tasks

• Information gap tasks

• jigsaw tasks

• Information transfer tasks

• Opinion gap tasks

• Reasoning tasks