Chapter 4: Process-Oriented Syllabus

Procedural Syllabuses :

  • A syllabus which is organised around tasks, rather than in terms of grammar or vocabulary.
  • Syllabus consist of the specification of the tasks and activities engaged in class.

The Bangalore Project

  1. Information-gap activity : transfer of information from one to another.


  2. Reasoning -gap activity : Deriving new info through deduction, inference, etc.


  3. Opinion-gap activity : identifying and articulating a personal preference.

Natural Approach

Krashen and Terrell (1983)

  1. The goal is communication skills.
  2. Comprehension precedes production.
  3. Production emerges.
  4. Activities promotes subconscious acquisition.
  5. The affective filter is lowered.

Weakness:

  • Learning takes place in a social vacuum (not suitable in a classroom)

Typology :

  1. Basic Personal Communication Skills
  2. Academic Learning Skills.

Task-based Syllabuses

Content syllabuses

Experiential content

  • Provides the point of departure for the syllabus.
  • Usually derived from some fairly well-defined subject area.

selecting subject areas gives logic & coherence

Definition
"...a piece of work undertaken for oneself or for others, freely or for some rward. 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 blirary book, taking a driving test, typing a letter, weighing a patient, sorting letters, taking a hotel reservation.... and helping someone across a roda. In other words, by 'task' is meant the hundred and one things people do in everyday life, at work, at play, and in between." (Long, 1985 p. 89)

facilitate learning not merely through language but with language.

Knowledge framework (Mohan 1986:36-7)

(A) Specific practical aspects
1. Description: Who, what, where?
2. Sequence: What happens? What is the plot?,...
3. Choice: what are the choices, conflicts, decisions?,...

(B) General practical aspects
1. Classification: what concepts apply? what are their relation?
2. Principles: what principles? (cause-effect, means-end, ...)
3. Evaluation: What values & standards? What counts as good or bad?

topics can be exploited in terms of these 6 categories, and task difficulty is determined by cognit. complexity

Specificity in planning instructional tasks

  1. The subject matter to be taught.
  2. Materials, i.e. those things the learner will observe/manipulate.
  3. The activities the teacher and learners will be carrying out.
  4. The goals for the tasks.
  5. The abilities, needs. and interests of the students.
  6. The social and cultural context of instruction.

Cadlin's (1987) criteria for task-selection

Promote attention to meaning, purpose, negotiation. :

Encourage attention to relevant data.

Draw objectives from the communicative needs of learners

Allow for flexible approaches to the task, offering different routes, media, modes of participation, procedures.

Allow for different solutions depending on the skills and strategies drawn by the learners.

Involve learner contributions, attitudes, and affects.

Be challenging but not threatening, to promote risk-taking.

Require input from all learners in terms of knowledge, skilss, participation.

Provide opportunities for language practice.

Promote a critical awareness about data and the processes of language learning.

Activities: "combinations of action and theoretical understanding", are realised through action situations

Review (Perry 1987: 141) - Mohan's assumptions

  1. Knowledge structure in his framework are indeed the relevant structures.
  2. "Moving from the practical to the theoretical is the direction most desirable for teaching and learning"

Syllabus design & methodology

Grading task

Widdowson (1987)

a syllabus is the specification of a teaching programme or a pedagogic agenda which defines a particular subject for a particular groups of learners. (such specification arranges the content as a succession of interim objective)

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Structural syllabus: prompt activities to internalise the formal properties

Functional-notional syllabus: promote activities to replicate in class “real” communication.
Classroom activities become “dress rehearsal” for life encounters.

Critics:

  • Both types assume certain methodological practices
  • Dress rehearsal: learners may not be able to transfer what they have learned to new situations but will only be able to perform in the limited situations they have rehearsed

Typology of activity types (Nunan 1985)

in which difficulty is determined by the cognitive and performance demands made upon the learner.

Activity type categorised according to learner responses:

Material Source

Productive

Interactive

Processing

No response

Response

Physical

Non-physical

Non-verbal

Verbal

Repetition

Response

Drill

Meaningful practice

Stimulated

Real

Discussion

Problem solving

Rehearsal

Role play

possible to take a given a text or piece of source material and exploit it by devising activities at different levels of difficulty.

With ESP and content-base syllabus, an obvious means of grading content is with reference to concepts associated with the subject in question.

Brown & Yule (1983)
Considerable attention to task difficulty

Listening task

Speaking task

Candlin (1987)
Factor determining difficulty

  • Cognitive load
  • Communicative stress
  • Particularity & generlizability
  • Code complexity & interpretive density
  • Content continuity
  • Process continuity