Introductory seminarPart 1 Course and Syllabus Design

Nur Hooton

Course and Materials Design Module CMDMSc in TESOL/TESP/TYL/EMT

Contents Unit 1 An Introduction to course and syllabus design Unit 2 Syllabus types and SLA Unit 3 Process, procedural and task-based syllabuses Unit 4 Lexical approaches to syllabus design Unit 5 From needs analysis to syllabus as corpus Unit 6 From setting objectives to evaluation procedures Unit 7 Approaches to materials analysis Unit 8 Materials, learners and teachers Unit 9 Authenticity & natural language in materials design Unit 10 From course to materials design Unit 11 Innovation & implementation Unit 12 Supplementary unit

The CSD element of the module

• a variety of approaches to syllabus and course design • key concepts and principles and rationale behind

language syllabus design• opportunity to appraise, evaluate and adapt

existing syllabuses and courses• research and design your own courses • research the language of the target discourse

community and use this to draw up a core syllabus for any group of learners

Learning outcomes

• Ability to recognise the type(s) of syllabus used for a particular course and to assess its strengths and weaknesses for a specific group of learners;

• Being able to make principled adaptations to an existing course or syllabus and be able to justify these in the light of the relevant theoretical issues;

• Ability to design your own courses based on your own research, and advise on materials and methodological approaches for these courses;

• Ability to describe a course in different ways to suit particular audiences (e.g. teachers, learners, sponsors, company training managers);

• Ability to advise on the use of technology for syllabus and course design.

Some key termsSyllabus

“the specification and ordering of content of a course or courses” (White, 1988)

“Syllabus design is based essentially on a decision about the ‘units’ of classroom activity, and the ‘sequence’ in which they are to be performed.” (Robinson, 1996:7)

“Any syllabus is a plan of what is to be achieved through teaching and learning.”

(Breen, 2001:151)

Course

“an integrated series of teaching - learning experiences, whose ultimate aim is to lead the learners to a particular state of knowledge” (Hutchinson and Waters, 1987)

‘a series of lessons’

Curriculum

“refers to the totality of content to be taught and aims to be realized within one school or educational system” (White, 1988)

“a curriculum subsumes a syllabus” (Markee, 1997)

“the philosophy, purposes, design, and implementation of a whole program” (Graves, 1996)

Defining key concepts syllabus course curriculum goals objectives needs / perceived needs / felt needs

Sequencing decisions in a syllabus - choices:

prospective and fixed

“on-line” i.e. during classroom activity (e.g. Breen’s process syllabus)

retrospective (Candlin)

Synthetic syllabuses

Content is pre-selected Teaching is incremental 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” (Wilkins, 1976)

Analytic syllabuses

Learning is organised in terms of social purposes

Learners interact with and analyse samples of language relevant to their needs Learners’ analytic capacities are used

Synthetic language teaching strategy

“A synthetic language teaching strategy is one in which the different parts of language are taught separately and step by step so that acquisition is a process of gradual accumulation of parts until the whole structure of language has been built up.”

(Wilkins, 1976:2)

In analytical syllabuses …

The starting point could be content defined in terms of situations, topics, or themes (see Nunan, 1988:38) - language is not linguistically graded.

Types of syllabuses

Synthetic Syllabuses

Structural/grammatical

Situational

Functional-notional (Wilkins)

[Communicative]Lexical (D.Willis)

Skills-based (Johnson)

Analytic Syllabuses

Task-based *

ProcessProcedural (Prabhu)

* Long and Crookes’ (1992) categorisation

Your own experiences . . .

type of syllabus?

Course Design

Task: Where would you begin as a course designer?

Assessing needsArticulating beliefsFormulating goals and objectivesDeveloping materialsDesigning an assessment planDefining the contextOrganising the courseConceptualising content

The answer?

No hierarchy in the processes No sequence in their accomplishment ‘articulating beliefs’ and ‘defining context’ serve as the

foundation for the other processes “… course development - designing a course and teaching it

- comprises a system, the way a forest or the human body is a system (Clark, 1987 cited in Graves, 2000:4) - components are interrelated.

“Course design is a system in the sense that planning one component will contribute to others; changes to one component will influence all the others.” (Graves, 2000:4)

Graves,K. 2000. Designing Language Courses. Heinle & Heinle.

Organising a course overlapping processes:

Determining the organising principle(s) (themes, genres, tasks)

Identifying the course units based on the organising principle(s)

Sequencing the units Determining unit content Organising unit content

Framework for curriculum planning

Reference 1

Graves, K. 2009. ‘The Curriculum of Second Language Teacher Education’. In Burns, A. And Richards, J. C. (eds.)The Cambridge Guide to Teacher Education. Cambridge University Press.

Reference 2

Roberts, J. 1998. Language Teacher Education. Arnold

(in particular, pages 249-252)

Assessment of the module

Assignment on:

Course design / syllabus design

Materials development and evaluation

For your assignment … Ability to recognise the type(s) of syllabus used for a particular course and

to assess its strengths and weaknesses for a specific group of learners;

Being able to make principled adaptations to an existing course or syllabus and be able to justify these in the light of the relevant theoretical issues;

Ability to design your own courses based on your own research, and advise on materials and methodological approaches for these courses;

Ability to describe a course in different ways to suit particular audiences (e.g. teachers, learners, sponsors, company training managers);Ability to advise on the use of technology for syllabus and course design.

Finally…