CURRICULUM DESIGN

“CURRICULUM DESIGN”

Curriculum design is a term used to describe the purposeful, deliberate and systematic organization of curriculum (instructional blocks) within a class or course. In other words, it is a way for teachers to plan instruction. When teachers design curriculum, they identify what will be done, who will do it, and when.

A.    Curriculum Development  : An Overview

It is a fact that curriculum is very often understood as something very complicated and not always necessary for language teaching. In many cases it is just replaced by the content of the textbook available for the course. A lot of arguments justifying the necessity for curriculum development may be given, only the most important of them being presented in this paper.  First, curriculum may be considered to be an attempt at planning the teaching-learning process. It is quite obvious that the results of a planned process are usually more effective compared to the results of an unplanned process. Planning permits the teacher to foresee the process, which is going to be developed in the classroom, to create a system, where all the elements are interrelated. Secondly, curriculum design is inevitably connected with the writer´s view of the nature of language and language learning, which generally serves as the basic criterion for materials selection or production and the development of the whole process. And finally, designing a curriculum promotes not only effective classroom learning but also teacher development as well, something which undoubtedly should be considered as one of the most important elements leading to the improvement of higher education.

In the center of chart are the basic normally followed in designing a curriculum. On each side are influential interacting factors.Toward the top, note that as goals are being defined and as a syllabus is being conceptualized,institutional constraints and avaible materials and resources must be simultaneously analyzed in order to maintain feasibility. In the lower part of the flowchart, the training, experience, and ability of the teacher will interact with the process of lesson design and teaching the course itself.Then, as instruction is ongoing, formative assessments will have the effect of monitoring students progress. Finally, assessment of students, teacher, and program can fruitfully lead to appropriate revision of the course.

B.     Situation Analysis

The goal of needs analysis is to collect information that can be used to develop a profile of the language needs of a group of learners in order to be able to make decisions about the goals and content of a language course. However, other factors apart from learner needs are relevant to the design and implementation of successful language programs. Language programs are carried out in particular contexts or situations. Clark (1987, xii) comments: A language curriculum is a function of the interrelationships that hold between subject-specific concerns and other broader factors embracing socio-political and philosophical matters, educational value systems, theory and practice in curriculum design, teacher experiential wisdom and learner motivation. In order to understand the foreign language curriculum in any particular context it is therefore necessary to attempt to understand how all the various influences interrelate to give a particular shape to the planning and execution of the teaching/learning process.

The contexts for language programs are diverse and the particular variables that come into play in a specific situation are often the key determinants of the success of a program. Some language curricula are planned for centrally organized state school systems where a great deal of direction and support for teaching is provided. Others take place in settings where there are limited human and physical resources. Some proposals for curriculum change are well received by teachers, but others may be resisted. In some situations, teachers are well trained and have time available to plan their own lesson materials.Every effective course is undergirded by a consideration of the following factors:

1.      Educational setting

2.      Class characteristics

3.      Faculty characteristics

4.      Governance of course content

5.      Assessment and evaluation requirements

C.     Needs Analysis

One of the basic assumptions of curriculum development is that a sound educational program should be based on an analysis of learners' needs. Procedures used to collect information about learners' needs are known as needs analysis. Needs analysis as a distinct and necessary phase in planning educational programs emerged in the 1960s as part of the systems approach to curriculum development and was part of the prevalent philosophy of educational accountablity (Stufflebeam, McCormick, Brinkerhoff, and Nelson 1985). If providers of training programs wanted public or other sources of funding in order to provide different kinds of training programs, they were required to demonstrate that a proposed program was a response to a genuine need (Pratt 1980). Subsequently needs analysis developed into something of an industry. Berwick (1989, 51) comments:The need for convincing precision in educational needs assessment was also reinforced during this period by the “behavioral objectives” movement in educational planning, particularly in North America, which insisted on specifying in measurable form all goals of importance within an educational system. The emphasis on precision and accountability clearly influenced the appearance of needs assessment as a form of educational technology and its diversification into a collection of educational research methodologies.

A needs assessment is an important precursor to designing  the goals of a course in that ,it can identify the overall purposes of the course.Objective needs are those that can be relatively easily measured, quantified, or specific with agreement by administrators on what constitutes defined needs. Subjective needs are  often of equal or greater importance as they focus on needs as seen though the eyes of the learners themselve.

D.    Problematizing

Problematizing a course, that is anticipating impediments, issues, and other potential obstacles in advance, will save untold hours of effort that may otherwise be spent “pathcing up” the shortcomings later on. A number of immediate problems came up : Did the learners perceive their own need to learn certain skills in English? Were manages supportive of the effort? Would workers receive paid time to take the course?Would prospective students have to pay to attend the course?These and a host of other problems had to be  addressed before the project could go forward, and many of them involved slowly turning wheels of bureaucracy.Courses are usually successful because they have anticipated such problems in advance and have effectively determined realistic answers to them.

E.     Specifying Golas

There are  terms goal and objective, we migh find some confusion in defining the two terms. Goal are rather broadly based aims and purposes in an seducational context, and are therefore more appropriately associated whith whole programs, course, or perhaps sizable modules within a course. Objective are much more specific than goals, both in their conception and in their context.Objective usually refer  to aims and purpuses within the narrow context of a lesson or an activity within a lesson.By the end of the course, students will be able to:

1.      Participate in social conversations in English

2.      Speak with few hesitations and with only minor errors

3.      Successfully apply some form-focused instraction to their speech

4.      Self-monitor their speech for potential errors

5.      Participate comfortably in pair, group, and whole class discussions

6.      Give a simple oral presentation on a familiar topic.

F.      Conceptualizing  A Course Syllabus

Sometimes excellent courses are launced simply on the basis of an  avaible textbook, and sometimes those curricula are unsuccessful. But it’s also rare to design the perfect curriculum the first time around , and so perhaps through the revision process a course can be redesigned quite successfully after a mediocre firts run.A communicative syllabus should minimally consist of:

1.      Goals for the course (and possibly goals for modules within the course)

2.      Suggested objectives for units and possibly for lessons

3.      A sequential list of functions, following from te goals, that the curriculum will fulfill. Such a list is typically organized into weeks or days.

4.      A sequential list of topics and situation matched to the function

5.      A sequential list of grammatical, lexical, and phonological forms to be taugh , again matched to the sequence of functions.

6.      A sequential list of skills (listening,speaking, reading,writing) that are also mathed to the above sequences.

7.      Macthed references throughout to textbook units, lesson, and pages, and additional resources to be used.

8.      Possible suggesstions of assessment alternative, including criteria to be tested and genres of assessment.

G.    Selecting Textbooks, Material, and Resources

The process of reviewing potential textbooks, material, and resources, is one that ideally takes place in concert with conceptualizing the syllabus.There are many diffrent ways of approaching  the process of reviewing textbooks and making a final decision.Rechards (2001, p.258), suggest the following criteria as a set of guidelines:

1.      They should correspond to learners needs. They should match the aims and objectives of the language program.

2.      They should reflect the uses that learners  will make of the language.

3.      They should take account of students needs as learners and should facilitate their learning processes, without dogmatically imposing a rigid “mrthod”.

4.      They should have  a clear role as support for learning. Like teachers, they should mediate between the target language and the learners.

H.    Assessment

Assessment of the students attainment of objectives of lessons and units , and of the goals of the curriculum, may be offered in a wide array of possible formats. Traditional periodie tests such as quizzes, multiple choice tests, fill in the blank test, and other somewhat mechanical test types offer the possibility of a practical, quick level check of students attainment.Midterm adn final examinitions migh include along with some of the above techniques, short essays, oral production, and more open-ended responses. Alternative in such assessment techniques are available in jurnals,portfolios, conferences, observation, intervies and self and peer evaluation.

I.       Rogram Evaluation

Two manifestatations of program evaluation are usually implied in a course; evaluation of the teacher and  of program itself. All three of these factors students , teacher, and program are interdepent.If the students are successful, the cause could be either the teacher or the syllabus, and not just the performance of students.Likewise, the success of a program may be attributed to a great extent to a teachers talent and ability to adapt a syllabus to an audience.A third way to view program evaluation is to consider various aspects of the  program, any or all which migh have contributed to the success or failure of a course:

·         Appropriateness of the course goals

·         Adequacy of the syllabus to meet those goals

·         Textbooks and materials used to support the curriculum

·         Classroom methodology, activities, procedures

·         The teachers training, background, and expertise

·         Approppriate orientation of teachers and students before the course

·         The students motivation and attitudes

·         The students perceptions of the course

·         The students actual perfomance as measured by assessment

·         Means for monitoring students progress through assessment

·         Institutional support, including resources, classroom, and environment

·         Staff collaburation and development before and during the course

J.       Topics For Discussion, Action, And Research

1.      Whole-class discussion: Brainstorm for one or two examples of courses that the class is familiar with.

2.      Group or pair work: Have small groups look at the factors listed in the ovals at the sides of the institutional factors, materials, teacher, variables, and formative ongoing assessment.

3.      Group or pair work: Have pairs quickly enumerate examples of objective needs and subjective needs in a course that both mambers of the pair are familiar with.

4.      Group or pair work: Among the members of the class, solich examples of “ problems” that have arisen, or migh arise, in a course familiar to everyone, in the process of developing a curriculum.

5.      Individual work:Assign the task  of finding  an existing syllabus for a language course.

6.      Group or pair work/ Whole-class discussion: Among a number of coursebooks that have been brought to class, students will choose one, and in pairs, analyze it for a defined context using either Richards’s four criteria and J.Brown’s five catagories.

7.      Whole-class discussion: Note that  in some, cases there is incomplete information about the program.

8.      Individual work/ Whole-class discussion: Have students interview  a teacher or administrator who has developed and used a course in order to find out what steps were taken in the development process.

9.      Teacher’s experiences

REFERENCES

H. Douglas Brown. 2007. Teaching by Principles An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy (3rd edition). New York: Pearson Long man.

Johnson R. K. 1989. The Second Language Curriculum.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Karen, Schweitzer.2017.Curriculum Design.From: https://www.thoughtco.com/curriculum-design-definition-4154176.Accessed on 11 may, 2018.

Richards, J. 2001. Curriculum Development in Language Teaching .Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. From: https//doi org. 10.1017/ CBO97805 11667220.005.Accessed on 12 may, 2018.