CONTENT CHOICE AND ORGANIZATION: THE SYLLABUS

Lecture 2

DESIGN IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING

1 Objectives

2 Syllabus

3 Types of learning and teaching activities

4 Learner and teacher roles

5 The role of instructional materials

6 Procedure

In order for an approach to lead to a method, it is necessary to develop a designfor an instructional system.

Design is the level of method analysis in which we consider:

a. What the objectives of a method are;

b. How language content is selected and organized within the method, that is the syllabus;

c. The types of learning tasks and teaching activities the method advocates;

d. The roles of learners;

e. The roles of teachers;

f. The role of instructional materials.

1. Different theories of language and language learning determine what a method sets out to achieve. Design specifies particular learning objectives. Some methods focus primarily on oral skills, and say that reading and writing skills are secondary. Some methods set out to teach general communication skills and give greater priority to the ability to express oneself meaningfully and to make oneself understood rather than to grammatical accuracy or perfect pronunciation.

Others place a greater emphasis on accurate grammar and pronunciation from the very beginning. Some methods set out to teach the basic grammar and vocabulary of a language. Others may define their objectives in terms of learning behaviors, that is what abilities the learner is expected to acquire as a result of instruction. Thus, all objectives can be divided into linguistically (product) oriented and process – oriented, depending on whether learning is seen as the means of accumulating knowledge or the means of becoming a more proficient learner.

CONTENT CHOICE AND ORGANIZATION: THE SYLLABUS

All the methods involve decisions concerning the selection of language items: words, sentence patterns, tenses, constructions, functions, topics, etc; that are to be used in teaching. One makes decisions about what to talk about (subject matter) and how to talk about it (linguistic matter). Methods differ as to the subject and linguistic matter around which language teaching should be organized. For example, ESP courses (English for Specific Purposes) are subject – matter focused, they choose what to talk about. Structurally based methods, such as Situational Language Teaching and the Audiolingual Method, are linguistically focused. Content for teaching is chosen according to the principles of selection. For instance, in grammar – based courses the content is chosen and sequenced according to the principle of gradation of difficulties of grammar items. In communicative – oriental courses sequencing of the content may be according to the learners’ communicative needs.

Traditionally the term syllabushas been used to refer to theformin whichlinguistic contentis specified in a course or method.

This term has been more closely associated with product centered methods rather than with process centered. Thus, the syllabus underlying the Situational and Audiolingual methods consists of a list of grammatical items and constructions, often together with a list of vocabulary items.

Notional – functional syllabuses specify the communicative content of a course in terms of functions, notions, topics, grammar and vocabulary. Such syllabuses are usually determined in advance of teaching.

The termsyllabus,however,is less frequently used in process-based methods, in which considerations of language content are often secondary.

For example, Counseling-Learning has no language syllabus as such. Neither linguistic matter nor subject matter is specified in advance. Learners select content for themselves, by choosing topics they want to talk about.

These are translated into the target language and used as the basis for interaction and language practice.

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