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 |  Tiêu đề: ENGLISH CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT  15th May 2013, 09:22 | |
| I. English Curriculum Development
Curriculum is …
An educational program which states:
a. The educational purpose of the program (the ENDs)
b. The content, teaching procedures and learning experiences which will be necessary to achieve this purpose (the MEANs)
c. Some means for assessing whether or not the educational ends have been achieved (the EVALUATION)
Curriculum Development
The study and development of the goals, content, implementation and evaluation of an educational system.
In LT, CD includes:
o The study of the purposes for which a learner needs a language (NEED ANALYSIS)
o The setting of OBJECTIVES, and the development of a SYLLABUS, teaching METHODS, and materials
o The EVALUATION of the effects of these procedure on the learner’s language ability
Design : Definition of linguistics, content, Procedure specification for the selection & organization of content & description of role of teacher, learners and teaching materials
Procedure : Description of techniques, practices in the instructional system
“Curriculum is a very general concept which involves consideration of the whole complex of philosophical, social and administrative factors which contribute to the planning of an educational program.” (Allen quoted in Nunan, 2000: 6)
A Syllabus
1. A syllabus is the specification of the work of a particular department in a school or college, organized in subsection defining the work of a particular group
2. It is often linked to time, and will specify a starting point and ultimate goal
3. It will specified some kind of sequence based on:
a. Sequencing intrinsic to a theory of language learning or to the structure of specified material relatable to language acquisition
b. Sequencing constrained by administrative needs, e.g. materials
4. It is a document of administrative convenience and will only be partly justified on theoretical grounds and so is negotiable and adjustable
5. It can only specify what is taught; it can not organize what is learnt
6. It is a public document and an expression of accountability (Brumfit 1984a)
A syllabus provides a focus for what should be studies along with a rationale for how that content should be selected and ordered (Mc kay 1978)
6 types of language teaching syllabi :
A Structural
A Notional/Functional
A Situational
A Skill-based
A Task-based
A Content-based
1. A Structural Syllabus
The content of language teaching is a collection of the form and structure, usually grammatical, of the language being taught. For example, Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives…
The domain of structure syllabi has tended to be limited to sentence (the sentence is the largest unit of discourse)
The sequencing of structures is from easy to difficult, from most frequently occurring to less frequently occurring
Materials are easy to identify because the table of content is organized around grammatical points.
A Structural Syllabus
Chapter 1 Verb Tenses
1-1 The simple tenses
1-2 The progress tenses
1-3 The perfect tenses
1-4 The perfect progressive tenses
Chapter 2 Modal auxiliaries and similar expressions …………..
Chapter 3 The passive ………….
2. A Notional/Functional Syllabus
The content of language teaching is a collection of the functions that are performed when language is used (informing, agreeing, promising…) or the notions that language is used to express (size, age, comparison…)
N/F focuses on semantic use
Authors select functions on their basis of their perceived usefulness to the students and then sequence them on the basis of some ideas of chronological, frequency or hierarchy of usefulness of the functions. E.g. greeting people, introducing someone, seeking information…
A Notional/Functional Syllabus
Lesson 1 Talking about yourself, starting a conversation
Lesson 2 Asking for information: question techniques
Lesson 3 Getting people to do things, requesting, attracting attention
Lesson 4 Talking about past events: remembering, describing…
Lesson 5 Conversation techniques: hesitating, preventing interruption ……… ……………
3. A Situational Syllabus
The content of language teaching is a collection of real or imaginary situations in which language occurs or is used.
The primary purpose of a situational language teaching syllabus is to teach the language that occurs in the situations.
The organization in a situational syllabus is based on common situations.
The selection of a situational syllabus is based on some feelings for the likelihood that Ss will encounter such situation
A Situational Syllabus
Lesson 1 Getting acquainted
Lesson 2 At the housing office
Lesson 3 At the airport
Lesson 4 In a restaurant
Lesson 5 Looking for an apartment ……… ……
4. A Skill-based Syllabus
The content of language teaching is a collection of specific abilities that may play a part in using language
The organization of the materials is around the language or academic skills that Ss will most need in order to learn a language
The selection of the skills is based on the author’s perception of their usefulness
The sequence of skills is based on some senses of chronology, frequency or relative usefulness of the skills.
A Skill-based Syllabus
Lesson 1 Skimming for general ideas
Lesson 2 Scanning for specific ideas
Lesson 3 Guessing vocabulary from context
Lesson 4 Topic sentence
Lesson 5 Reference words ……… ………
5. A Task-based Syllabus
The content of language teaching is a series of complex and purposeful tasks that Ss want or need to perform with the language they are learning
Authors who favor task-based syllabi organize materials around different types of tasks that Ss are required to perform in the language learning
The selection of task is based on their perceived usefulness to the students
A Task-based Syllabus
Lesson 1 Writing notes and memos
Lesson 2 Writing personal letters
Lesson 3 Writing telegraphs, personal ads
Lesson 4 Writing descriptions
Lesson 5 Describing process ……… …………
6. A Content-based Syllabus
The primary purpose of instruction is to teach some content or information using the language that Ss are also learning
Ss are simultaneously language students and Ss of whatever content being taught
The subject matter is primary, and language learning occurs incidentally to the content learning
The language teaching is organized around content teaching
II. NEED ANALYSIS
INTRODUCTION
In general terms, need analysis (also called need assessment) refers to the activities involved in gathering information that will serve as the basis information that will serve as the basis developing a curriculum that will meet the learning needs of a particular group of students.
Need analysis (In the formal and technical sense) is relatively new in language teaching circles. There will be three steps in need analysis:
1. Making basic decisions about the need analysis
2. Gathering Information
3. Using the Information
MAKING BASIC DECISION ABOUT THE NEED ANALYSIS
Before any need analysis can take place, curriculum planners must make certain fundamental decisions.
WHO WILL BE INVOLVED IN THE NEEDS ANALYSIS?
Four categories of people may become involved in a need analysis; the target group, the audience, the need analysis and the resource group.
1. The target group: is made up those people about whom information will ultimately be gathered.
2. The audience: for a need analysis should encompass all people who will eventually be required to act upon the analysis.
3. The need analysis: are those persons responsible for conducting the need analysis.
4. The resource group: consist of any people who may serve as sources of information about the target group.
WHAT TYPES OF INFORMATION SHOULD BE GATHERED?
According to Stufflebeam, four divergent philosophies can arise in a need analysis: the discrepancy, the democratic, the analytic, and the diagnostic.
1. Discrepancy philosophy is one in which needs are viewed as differences, or discrepancies, between a desired performance from students and what they are actually doing.
2. Democratic philosophy is one in which a need is defined as any change that is desired by a majority of the group involved.
3. Analytic philosophy a need is whatever the students will naturally learn next based on what is known about them and the learning processes involved.
WHICH POINTS OF VIEW SHOULD BE TAKEN
The philosophy adopted by a particular program or group of needs analysis can clearly affect the types of information gathered in the analysis. Unfortunately many of the needs that are initially perceived as important may not turn out to be so. The point of view taken on each of these dichotomies will in turn be related to and influenced by the philosophy that is dominant in a given program.
Situation Needs Versus Language Needs
The first dichotomy is one that distinguishes between two types of information found in any language program. Need related to this type of information will be labeled situation needs in this book. The second sort of information is about the target linguistic behaviors that the learners must acquire. These target linguistic behaviors will be labeled language needs. This distinction between situation needs and language needs is not a clear-cut dichotomy because the two categories are often interrelated. When need analysis are confronted with the masses of information that can emerge in a need analysis, keeping the distinction between situation needs and language needs in mind will be particularly useful for sorting through the information and finding useful patterns.
Objective needs versus subjective needs
Objectives needs are those needs determined on the basis of clear cut, observable data gathered that students must eventually acquire. Subjective needs are generally more difficult to determine because they have to do “wants”, “desires”, and “expensive”. This distinction between objective needs and subjective needs should not be confused with the two types of data, quantitative and qualitative, that could be gathered on either objective or subjective needs.
Linguistic content vs learning processes
The linguistic content position tends to favor needs analyzed objectively from a language needs perspective and spelled out in linguistic terms. The learning process position leans toward needs specified from a situation needs perspective. The distinction between content and learning processes is hardly a new one.
HOW MIGHT PHILOSOPHY AND POINTS OF VIEW?
Objective
Learning Processes
Language
Linguistic
Content
Subjective
Situation
A decision regarding one dichotomy in this figure can easily have an effect in the balance chosen for another dichotomy.
For example, consider what would happen in an analysis if language needs were viewed as much more important than situation needs. this viewpoint would probably affect the balance taken between objective and subjective needs ( with a resulting shift toward the objective ) as well as the balance between linguistic content and learning process needs ( with a shift toward the linguistic content ).
Although for simplicity's sake I have discussed the three dichotomies as if they are separate, they should be viewed as three interrelated aspects of developing an overall program viewpoint on the types of needs that will be assessed. This decision would in turn have to be consistent with whatever balance of philosophies was selected earlier.
GATHERING INFORMATION
Richards, Platt and Weber (1985, p.189) suggest that a needs assessment seeks information on:
• The situations in which a language will be used (including who it will be used with)
• The objectives and purposes for which the language is needed
• The types of communication that will be used (e.g., written, spoken, formal, informal)
• The level of proficiency that will be required
In the process, the analysts should remain flexible enough to allow for new areas of investigation to develop and old ones to be discarded as the process of needs assessment proceeds. The choices made depend on the philosophy of the needs analysts, as well as their points of view on the various types of information that can be examined. Once all that is clarified, the fundamental techniques used for gathering information are relatively straightforward and such techniques are simple because they all involve, in one way or another, finding answers to relatively simple questions.
TYPES OF QUESTIONS
In the process of gathering information, different types of questions should be considered. Rosset (1982) identified five categories of questions designed to identify the following problems, priorities, abilities, attitudes and solutions.
Problems
The purpose of these questions is to identify the problems that are being experienced by the people under assessment in target group.
Priorities
Questions of priority investigate which topics, language uses, skills, and so on are considered most important for target group to learn. Such questions can be asked of any of the resource groups in the program
Abilities
Abilities questions focus on the student themselves, usually to determine the abilities of the students at entry
Attitudes
Attitude questions are created to uncover information about participants’ feelings and attitudes toward element of program
Solutions
The last class of questions elicits ideas for solutions to perceived problems in terms of what changes might being about compromise and resolution.
TYPES OF INSTRUMENTS
These types of instruments consists of:
• Existing Information
The purpose of this set of procedures is to utilize any preexisting information that may be available and the existing information can include data sources within a program (such as files or records that may be on hand when the needs analysis begins), or external data courses (such as literary resources or letters exchanged with other existing programs with similar students).
• Tests
Tests can provide a wealth of information about the general ability levels of students , about possible ability groupings that will make sense within a program, about the specific problems that students may be having with the language , and about their achievement in previous programs.
• Observations
This category of instrumentation usually involves watching an individual or small number of individuals, and recording behavior that occur. It is used to get some particular informations.
• Interviews
Interview procedures are fairly open-ended type of instrumentation. There are two kinds of interviews that are individual interviews and group interviews. Individual interviews allow for gathering personal responses and views privately while group interviews might appear to be one way around the time problem, but it is important to remember that the information given in a group interview is not confidential. Indeed, the contrasts in the opinions of people who have been interviewed both individually and in a group format can themselves prove illuminating.
• Meetings
Meetings differ from group interviews in their purpose. Whereas group interviews may help the needs analyst to gather information from the group, meetings are more likely to be structured so that the participants can accomplish certain tasks.
• Questionnaires
Questionnaires can be designed to accomplish any of the following purposes. Biodata surveys are used to elicit facts about the background of each of the participants (students’ age, place of birth, sex, marital status, number of years of language study, and the like).Self ratings procedure requires individuals to rate their own abilities, interest levels, motivation and useful for obtaining practical insights into the self-image of individuals. Participants might also be asked to do judge mental ratings in which they give their evaluation of various aspects of the program. Finally, the Q sort combines several of the procedures defined above because it asks individuals to give their own attitudes, views, and opinions, but also to rank them in terms of importance. Questionnaires of all kinds may turn out to be very useful in gathering large scale information on the needs of students.
SELECTING AND CREATING PROCEDURES
Three characteristics must be considered when using any information – gathering procedures. Only then can the advantages and disadvantages of the different categories of procedures be explored.
Characteristic of Procedures
The three characteristic of sound information-gathering procedure are reliability, validity, and usability ;
1. Reliability will be defined here as the consistency with which procedure obtains information. Thus reliability must be considered when selecting or creating a procedure for analyzing needs.
2. The validity of a procedure will be defined here as the degree to which is measuring what it claims to measure.
3. The concept of usability must be considered. In most cases, this issues has to do with the degree to which a procedure is practical to use.
Clearly, reliability, validity, and usability are interrelated and should probably be considered to be equally important. In other words, a procedure must logically be reliable, valid, and usable within a given context before it can be effectively used in a need analysis.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Different Procedures
All of the procedures discussed here are imperfect, at least to some degree. Fortunately they are imperfect in different ways, that is, each of these procedures has different strengths and different weaknesses. Thus if analysis use various combinations of procedures, they will create a stronger overall information-gathering process. In other words, multiple sources of information should be used in a need analysis-although the specific combination appropriate for a given situation must be decided on the site by the need analysis.
CONSIDERATIONS SPECIFIC TO LANGUAGE NEEDS ANALYSIS
Discourse Analysis
Direct observations and data collection on the language used in particular settings and for specific purposes may prove useful in studying students’ language needs.
One way of using discourse analysis to study students’ needs is described in the elaborate model provided in Munby (1978,pp.190-98). He suggests the following nine parameters as the framework for a needs analysis.
Participants; biographical facts and language background
Purposive domain: the specific purposes for which the language will be used
Setting: physical and psychosocial characteristics of the setting
Interaction: the social relationships involved
Instrumentality: medium, mode, and channel of communication
Dialect: regional, class, and temporal
Target level : language characteristics required and under what conditions
Communicative event: events and functions
Communicative key: attitude and tone
In general, Munby’s framework emphasizes the subjective side of needs analysis because it relies heavily on the analyst’s institution. Nevertheless, it offers a useful framework for observing and sorting through information about types of discourse that student will eventually need to use.
Text Analysis
If the learners will encounter the target language primarily in print - that is , for purposes of reading or writing – text analysis may help in determining what the students will ultimately have to read or write. Many different genres and types of texts may come under scrutiny (for example, scientific discourse, newspaper editorials, or social science journal articles) in this form of analysis. Again , the units of analysis chosen ( for instance, cohesive devices, rhetorical features, readability, or vocabulary) will tend to reflect the need analysts’ understandings of the nature of different kinds of texts and the analysts’ belief systems with the regard to the nature of language and language learning.
EXAMPLE NEEDS ANALYSES
Guangzhou English Language Center, Zhongshan University
• Existing information
• Tests
• Observations
• Meetings
• Questionnaires
English Language Institute, University of Hawaii at Manoa
• Literature review
• Initial survey
• Case studies
• Questionnaires
• Meetings
• Summarizing the results
III. Goals and Objectives
Goals:
In this part of the unit we will focus on how the information gathered in a needs analysis can be transformed into statements that describe the purpose of a programme.
When we studied needs analysis, we saw that the process can generate a large amount of information which must be critically sorted and used in some way within the curriculum. One way of using this information is for the formulation of programme goals and objectives.
Goals, which are also called aims, are general statements concerning desirable and attainable programme purposes based on perceived language and situation needs. Brown (1995) mentions four points that should be remembered:
1. Goals are general statements of the programme’s purposes.
2. Goals should usually focus on what the programme hopes to accomplish in the future, and particularly on what the students should be able to do when they leave the programme.
3. They can serve as one basis for developing more precise and observable objectives.
4. Goals should never be viewed as permanent, that is, they should never become set in cement.
How do you understand point 4?
There are different types of goals:
• situation-centred goals, as in: “The student will be able to order a meal”
• functional goals: as in: “The student will learn how to complain”
• structural goals: as in: “The student will learn how to talk about actions in the past”
• There are other types of goals which are related to attitudes and feelings, for example: “The students will gain an appreciation of American culture” or “To motivate the learning of other subjects through English”
Goals must describe more than simply the activities that students will take part in. The following example isnot a goal: “The student will study English for business”
In order to construct a correct goal, it is necessary to mention the changes in the learners that will result. Let’s modify the previous example: The student will be able to communicate in English at a basic level for business purposes”
Objectives:
The process of defining goals helps to consider or reconsider the programme’s purposes with specific reference to what the students should be able to do at the end of the programme. Goal statements can serve as a basis for developing more specific descriptions of the kinds of learning behaviours the programme will address. These more specific descriptions are called instructional objectives.
Instructional objectives or teaching objectives are the specific statements that describe the particular knowledge, behaviour and/or skills that the learner will be expected to know or perform at the end of a course or programme. Objectives will serve as the building blocks that lead to accomplishing a broader curriculum goal. In general, they have the following characteristics:
• They describe what the aim seeks to achieve in terms of smaller units of learning.
• They provide the basis for the organization of teaching activities.
• They describe learning in terms of observable behaviour or performance.
Richards (2001) mentions that the advantages of describing the aims of a course in terms of objectives are:
• They facilitate planning: once objectives have been agreed on, course planning, preparation of materials, textbook selection, and related processes can begin.
• They provide measurable outcomes and thus provide accountability: given a set of objectives, the success or failure of a programme to teach those objectives can be measured.
• They are prescriptive: they describe how planning should proceed and do away with subjective interpretations and personal opinion.
Objectives are easy to identify because they are specific. According to Mager (1975), objectives, in order to be specific, must include three components:
1. Performance: what the learner will be able to do.
2. Conditions: important conditions under which the performance is expected to occur.
3. Criterion: the quality or level of performance that will be considered acceptable.
Considering these three components will help us not only to distinguish objectives from goals but also to formulate clear and concise objectives for a language programme.
Benefits of using objectives
In sum, objectives will help teachers:
• To transform the perceived needs of the students into teaching points.
• To clarify and organize their teaching points.
• To think through the skills and subskills underlying instructional points.
• To decide on what they want the students to be able to do at the end of instruction.
• To decide on the appropriate level of specificity for the teaching activities that will be used.
• By providing a blueprint for the development of tests and other evaluation instruments.
• To adopt, develop, or adapt teaching materials that maximally match the students’ needs.
• To evaluate each learner’s progress, as well as overall programme effectiveness, by permitting the systematic study, modification and improvement of their perceptions of students’ needs, course objectives, tests, materials, teaching and evaluation procedures.
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