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CURRICULUM
DESIGN
A. Curriculum Development: An Overview
The process of design a course, a sequence of steps
that will be explained in the subsequent sections. Goals are being defined and
as a syllabus are being conceptualized, institutional constrains and available
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,
assessments of students, teacher, and program can fruitfully lead to appropriate
revision of the course.
B. Situation Analysis
Every effective course is undergirded by a
consideration of following factors: (1) educational setting, (2) class characteristics,
(3) faculty characteristics, (4) governance of course content, and (5)
assessment and evaluation requirement. If it’s a new course you are about to
design, or one that is in need of revision, or simply a course you’re teaching
and you need some background information, a situation analysis allows you to
lay some foundation stones for either further development or for understanding
the nature of a course.
C. Needs Analysis
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, gaps that the course is intended to fill, and the opinions of both
course designers and learners about their reasons for designing or taking the
course. To indentify at least two types of needs are objective and subjective.
Objective needs are those that can be relatively easily
measured, quantified, or specified with agreement by administrators on what
constitutes defines needs. Subjective needs are even of equal or greater
importance as they focus on needs as seen through the eyes of the learners
themselves.
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 patching up the shortcomings later
on. Courses are usually successful because they have anticipated such problems
in advance and have effectively determined realistic answers to them.
E. Specifying Goals
The term goals and objective are often interchanged
in pedagogical literature and depending, you might find some confusion in
defining the two terms. Goals are rather broadly based aims and purposes in an
educational context, and are therefore more appropriately associated with whole
programs, courses, or perhaps sizable modules within a course. According to
Brown (1995, P.71), goals are general statement concerning desirable and
attainable program purposes and aims. Objectives are much more specific than
goals, both in their conception and in their context. Objective usually refers
to aims and purposes within the narrow context of a lesson or an activity
within a lesson. Most curriculum experts agree that once a situation analysis
and needs analysis have confirmed some of the general parameters of a course,
goals need to be carefully stated in order to be certain about what the course
will accomplish and what it will not.
F. Conceptual A Course Syllabus
A communicative syllabus should minimally consist
of: (1) goals for the course, (2) suggested objectives for units and possibly
for lessons, (3) a sequential list of functions (purposes), following from the
goals that the curriculum will fulfill, (4) a sequential list of situations
matched to the functions, (5) a
sequential list of grammatical, lexical, and/or phonological forms to be
taught, again matched to the sequence of functions, (6) a sequential list of
skills (listening, speaking, reading, writing) that are also matched to the
above sequence, (7) matched reference throughout to textbook units, lessons,
and/or pages, and additional resources (audio, visual, workbooks, etc.) to be
used, (8) possible suggestions of assessment alternatives, including, criteria
to be tested and genres of assessment (traditional tests, journals, portfolios,
etc.).
G. Selection Textbooks, Materials, And Resources
The process of reviewing potential textbooks,
materials, and resources, beyond those that you might design yourself is one
that ideally takes place in concert with conceptualizing the syllabus. Suggest
the following criteria as a set of guidelines: (1) they should correspond to
learners’ needs. (2) They should reflect the uses (present or future) 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 “method.” (4) They should have a clear role as a
support for learning.
H. Assessment
Assessment of 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 periodic 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 and final examinations might include, along with some of
the above techniques, short essays, oral production, and more open-ended
responses.
I. Program Evaluation
Two manifestations of program evaluations are
usually implied in a course: evaluations of the teacher and of the program
itself. Of course, all three of these factors students, teacher program-are
interdependent. If 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 teacher’s
talent and ability to adapt a syllabus to an audience. And then again, a poorly
motivated group of students and an inadequate program could make the world’s
best teacher look bad.
A third way to view program evaluation is to
consider various aspects of the program, any or all of which might have
contributed to the success of failure of a course: 1. Appropriateness of the
course goals (in meeting needs and purposes). 2. Adequacy of the syllabus to
meet those goals. 3. Textbooks and materials used to support the curriculum. 4.
Classroom methodology, activities, procedures. 5. The teacher’s training,
background, and expertise. 6. Appropriate orientation of teachers and students
before the course. 7. The students’ motivation and attitudes. 8. The students’
perceptions of the course. 9. The students’ actual performance as measured by assessments.
10. Means for mentoring students’ progress through assessment. 11.
Institutional support, including resources, classrooms, and environment. 12.
Staff collaboration in development before and during the course.
REFERENCES
Brown, H.D., (2007). Teaching by Principles: An Interactive
Approach Language Pedagogy 3rd Ed. New York: Pearson Longman.
Brown, J. D.
(1995). The elements of language curriculum: A systematic approach to
programs development. Boston: Heinle & Heinle.
Graves, K.
(1996). Teachers as course developers. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press.
Graves, K.
(2000). Designing language courses: A guide for teachers. Boston: Heinle
& Heinle.
Murphy, J.,
& Byrd, P. (Eds). (2001). Understanding the courses we teach: Local
perspectives on English language teaching. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press.
Richards, J.
(2001). Curriculum and development in language teaching. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
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