Curriculum and Language Teaching

 Curriculum And Language Teaching

An Overview

 

Curriculum design can be seen as a kind of writing activity and as such it can usefully be studied as a process. The typical sub-processes of the writing process (gathering ideas, ordering ideas, ideas to text, reviewing, editing) can be applied to curriculum design, but it makes it easier to draw on current curriculum design theory and practice if a different set of parts is used. The curriculum designs model in figure. Consists of three outside circles and subdivide inner circle. The outer circles (principles, environment, needs) involve practical and theoretical considerations that will have a major effect in guiding the actual process of course production. There is a wide range of factors to consider when designing a course. These include the leaner’s' present knowledge and lacks, the resources available including time, the skill of the teachers, the curriculum designer's strengths and limitations, and principles of teaching and learning. If factors such as these are not considered in three sub-processes, environment analysis needs analysis and the application of principles. The result of environment analysis is a ranked list of factors and a consideration of the effects of these factors on the design. The result of needs analysis is a realistic list of language, ideas or skills items, as a result of considering the present proficiency, future needs and wants of the learners. The application of principles involves first of all deciding on the whole design process. The result of applying principles is a course where learning is given the greatest support. 

Part of Curriculum and Language Teaching 

1. Considering and Environment 

Environment analysis involves considering the factors of the situation in which the course will be used and determining how the course should take account of them. 

 

One way of approaching environment analysis is to work from a list of question which focus on the nature of the learners, the teachers and the teaching situation. Here is a short list of some of the other factors that teachers considered most important.

•  The small amount of time available for the course

•   The large size of the classes • The wide range of proficiency in the class

•   The immediate survival needs of the learners 

•  The lack of appropriate reading materials 

•  The teachers’ lack of experience and training 

•  The learners’ use of the first language in the classroom 

•  The need for the learners to be more autonomous 

 Here are some examples:

 1. The communicative based course which was deserted by its Vietnamese learners because they were not getting the grammar teaching that they expected. They set up their own grammar-based course.

 2. The course for Agricultural students which had a simplified version of The Moonstone by Willie Collins as its main reading text. Some of the learners produced their own translation of it which they copied and sold to other learners. They saw no value in coming to grips with its content through English. 

3. The adult conversation course which began with the game “Simon says”. Half the students stopped attending after the first lesson. There is no conversation in “Simon Says”.  

Each important factor needs to be accompanied by one or more effects. For example, the factor “the large size of the class” could have the following effect on the curriculum design. 1. A large amount of group work. 

2. Use of special large class techniques like oral reproduction, blackboard reproduction, the pyramid procedure involving the individual-pair-group-class sequence (Nation and Newton, 2009). 

3. Independent work or individualized tasks.

 2.  Discovering Needs

 Hutchinson and Waters (1987) make a useful division of learners’ needs into necessities (what the learner has to know to function effectively), lacks (what the learners knows and does not know already) and wants (what the learners think they need). 

These are discovered by a variety of means: by testing, by questioning and interviewing, by recalling previous performance, by consulting employers, teacher and others involved, by collecting data such as text books and manuals that the learners will have to read and analyzing them, and by investigating the situations where the learners will need to use the language. Ways of doing needs analysis can be evaluated by the same general criteria used to evaluate tests-reliability, validity and practicality. 

3.   Following principles

  

 Research on language teaching and learning should be used to guide decisions on curriculum design. There is considerable research on the nature of language and language acquisition which can guide the choice of what to teach and how to sequence it. There is also a lot of research on how to encourage learning in general and language learning in particular which can be used to guide the presentation of item to be learned. The principles derived from this research include principles on the importance of repetition and thoughtful processing of material, on the importance of taking account of individual differences and learning style, and learner attitudes and motivation. It is very important that curriculum design makes connection between the research and the theory of language learning and the practice of designing lessons and courses. There is a tendency for this connection not to be made, with the he result that curriculum design and therefore learners do not benefit from development in knowledge gained from research. A striking example from this is the failure of courses to make account o the finding regarding the interference that occurs when semantically and formally related items, such as, opposites, near synonyms and lexical sets, are presented together (Higa, 1963; Tinkham, 1993). In spite of the clear findings of this research, which is supported by a large body of research less firmly in the area of language learning, course books, continue to present names of the parts of the body, items in the kitchen, opposite such as hot-cold, long-short, old-new, numbers, days of the week and articles of clothing in the same lesson. As Tinkham (1993) and Higa (1963) show, this will have the effect of making more difficult than it should be.

 4.  Goals

 The curriculum design model in figure. This is because it essential to decide why a course is being taught and what the learners need to get from it. 

1. The aim of communicative teaching is to encourage students to exploit all the elements of the language that they know in order to make their meaning clear. 

2. Trio aim to a) encourage students to communicate in a wide range of everyday situations. b) sustain interest and motivation ..... c) help students understand and formulate the grammatically rules of English. d) develop students’ receptive skills beyond of their productive skills. e) give students insights into daily life in Britain. f) develop specific skills, including skills require for examination purposes. g) contribute to the students’ personal, social and educational development. 

3. Passages extends students’ communicative competence by developing their ability to: • Expands the range of topics they can discuss and comprehend in English. • Speak English fluently • Speak English accurately 

4. Students continue to develop speaking and listening skills necessary for participating in classroom discussions with an introduction to oral presentation and critical listening skills. Content and Sequencing The content of language courses consists of the language items, ideas skills, and strategies that meet the goals of the course. One a way to provide a systematic and well researched basis for a course is to make use of frequency lists and other lists of language items or skills. 

A conversation course for example could be carefully planned to cover the important high frequency vocabularies and structures, and still consist of a series of very free task-based conversation activities (Joe, Nation, dan Newton, 1996). Typical lists include: 1. Frequency-based vocabulary lists. These consist of lists of words with indicators of their frequency of occurrence. 2. Frequency list of verb forms and verb groups. These contain items such as simple past, present continuous, verb + to + Stemp ( Where the Stemp is dominant) goingto + Stemp, and can + Stemp (ability) along with information about their frequency occurrence, mainly in written text. The most striking feature of these list is the very high frequency of a small number of items, such as simple past, verb + to + Stemp, and the very low frequency of most of the items studied (Many of which are given unjustified prominence in many course book and grading schemes for simplified readers). These list can be found in George 1963a, 1963b, and 1972; see also Appendix 1 of this book. The more recent Biber et al. (1999) grammar contains frequency information. Comparison of beginners’ books of published courses with these list shows that the course books contain a mixture of high – frequency and low frequency items and could be considerably improved with more inform selection. 3. List of functions and topics. These list are not frequency – based and as a result selection of items must be based on perceived need which is less reliable than frequency evidence. The most useful of the available lists is Van EK and Alexander (1980). 4. List of sub skills and strategies. These include the Sub skills of Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing, and language coping and learning strategies. 5. There are list of tasks, topics and themes that curriculum designers can refer to (Munby, 1978; Van EK and Alexander, 1980; Prabhu, 1987), but it is better for curriculum designers to develop their own lists, taking account of the background factors of their learners and their needs. One important aspect of using lists is that they not only check or determine the items that should be in the courses, but they can be used to exclude those that should not be there, that is, those that are not in the list. The result of analyses based on lists of language items is a set of items that represent sensible and achievable language goals for the course. Needs analysis can play a major role in determining the content of courses, particularly for language items. As well as using needs analysis to set language goals, it is useful to decide the basis for the ideas content of the course. An important decision at this stage involve choosing the form the syllabus will take. Dubin and Olshtain (1986) describe several syllabus forms including linear, modular, cyclical, and matrix. Whatever form is chosen will have a marked effect on the opportunity for repetition of items to be learned. Finding a Format and Presenting Material The material in a course needs to be presented to learners in a form that will help learning. This presentation will involve the use of suitable teaching techniques and procedures, and these needs to put together in lessons. Some lessons must consist of an unpredictable series of activities, while others might be based on a set format, where the same sequences of activities occurs in all or most of the lessons. There are several advantages to having a set format for lessons. Firstly, the lessons are easier to make because each one doesn’t have to be planned separately. It also make the course easier to monitor, to check if all that should be include is there and accepted principles are being followed. Finally, it makes the lessons easier to learn from because the learners can predict what will occur and are soon familiar with the learning procedures required by different parts of the lesson. Evaluating a Course Information gained from assessment is a useful source of data about the effectiveness of a course, but it is only one of the source of information that can contribute to the evaluation of a course. Basically, Evaluation tries to answer the question “Is this a good course?” The range of meanings that can be attached to “good” determines the range of source of information for carrying out an evaluation. A “good” course could be one that: 1. Attracts a lot of students 2. Satisfies the learners 3. Satisfies the teachers 4. Help learners gain high scores in an external test 5. Result in a lot of learning 6. Applies state – of –the-art knowledge about language teaching and learning 7. Is held in high regard by the local or international community 8. Follows accepted principles of curriculum An evaluation of a course can have many purposes, the main ones being to continue or discontinue the course, or to bring about improvements in the course. Responsible curriculum design includes ongoing evaluation of the course. Summary of The Steps 1. Examine the Environment 2. Assess needs 3. Decides on principles 4. Set a goals, and choose and sequences contents 5. Design the Lesson Format 6. Include assessment procedures 7. Evaluate the course Conclusion Curriculum design is a dynamic and ongoing process of defining, assessing, and refining educational outcomes and methods of achieving them. In subsequent modules, we will discuss the parts of a curriculum and the relevant processes in more detail.