Course design – adapted from:

                                    COURSE AND MATERIALS DESIGN
                                    by Jane Willis & Sue Garton


An introduction to course and syllabus design

1.1. Some definitions

Courses and syllabuses are generally perceived to be two different things, partly it must be
admitted simply by customary collocation, given that the two terms are not always used
indistinguishably. But a “course” might be taken to mean a real series of lessons (the particular
course delivered last year to such and such a group of students and to be repeated again this
year), while a “syllabus” can be taken to be something rather more abstract, with fewer details of
the blow by blow conduct of individual lessons. Thus you and I might quite properly write rather
different courses, with different materials, but based on the same syllabus. This happens a lot in
publishing. For example when notions and functions became popular as a basis for course design,
each major ELT publisher published a course based on what became known as a 'notional/functional'
syllabus, often using the Council of Europe staged language taxonomies as a basis e.g. van Ek, J
1975. And each course was different. However, when one is in the short course market, (often ESP),
it can work the other way round as Graves, 1996, shows. This is after all a book on course design
rather than syllabus design, and Graves takes White's (1988) definition: 'A syllabus will be
defined narrowly as the specification and ordering of content of a course or courses." (Graves
1996:3). So, you may start with the demand for a course, for a specific group of learners over a
specific length of time, and then you design a syllabus for it.

As far as the word “design” is concerned, it is fair to point out, that it too may be tested and
evaluated. A major point of debate in contemporary debate in course design is concerned precisely
with how much design should go into a particular course, that is, how much should be negotiated
with the learners, how much predetermined by the teacher, and how much left to chance and the mood
of the participants on the day. This notion is bound up with the idea of the “focus on the
learner”, to repeat the title of a well-known book, and more recently with ideas of control and
initiative in the classroom. (We shall return to some of these ideas later.)

The above, though, are not major problems for most learners and scholars. Some people, however, get
mired down in the task of differentiating between Course or Syllabus Design and Methodology, a task
it is probably necessary to undertake at the level of broad outline and futile and frustrating if
the attempt is made to delve into minutiae. Roughly, one would want to say that CSD is concerned
with the content of what gets taught and the organisation of this (into bits of grammar, or
functions, or what have you), while Methodology is concerned with the how. This, however, is a
question it is best not to consider too closely. It is disingenuous in the extreme to suppose that
the “what” of teaching is put together without reference to the “how”; contemporary syllabuses are
almost always designed with a particular - generally broadly communicative - methodology in mind.
And scholars have muddied the waters still further by misappropriating the word “communicative”,
which ought to be a matter of methodology but is commonly used to refer to syllabus design.

1.2. Syllabuses as lists

Let us begin by assuming an air of complete naïveté. Let us temporarily move away from the
exigencies of the classroom, the sponsor and our director who want something now, and presume
nothing at all. What is a syllabus?

Well, it involves a list. Perhaps we might say, a list of things we want our learners to learn in
the English class. So, what do we want them to learn?

There are four problems here:

• what we want them to learn could be extremely varied;
• some of the things we want them to learn are easy to articulate;
• others are not; the “what” and the “how” of learning are intimately, and perhaps inextricably,
bound up;
• our formulation assumes that we do indeed want a pre-established list of things to be learned.

We will be returning to all these problems at various points during this module, but I want to
begin by looking at what these pre-established lists of things might consist of and giving some
overviews of ways in which people have attempted to classify and organise them.

1.3 Ways of specifying content of a language syllabus

CONTENT SKILL METHOD

TOPIC
Informational LANGUAGE LEARNING PROCESS PROCEDURAL
Structural focus focus Receptive/ Skill Learning Cognitive
Productive acquisition focus focus
focus Learner-led Task-based

SITUATION
Contextual focus
Notional/Functional focus

Figure 1 Bases for language syllabus design (sources: White (1988); ovals, Breen (1987);
rectangles, Allen (1984)

Finally, Willis D summarises major approaches to syllabus design, making an explicit distinction
between discrete item and holistic modes, and looking at focus and content for each. See Figure 2.
MODE FOCUS CONTENT

Grammar

Linguistic Lexis

Discrete item
(Type A) Phonology
Notions
Semantic/
Pragmatic
Functions
SYLLABUS TYPE
(Skills)
Topics
Holistic Learning Tasks
(Type B) process
(Skills)

Nowadays, you are unlikely to find a course book or indeed a course that uses only one of these
forms of specification. But more often than not, even in the “Multi-syllabus” Course books, there
will be one or two major organising factors, such as grammar and/or functions, with topics selected
to illustrate the grammatical or functional items. Other features like lexis, phonology, and skills
practice are often subservient to the main strands and are built in along the way.

Prabhu, by contrast, bases his syllabus on sets of tasks, each set grouped around a specific topic,
such as school timetables or journeys. This is an example of a totally holistic approach: his
syllabus contains no overt itemistic linguistic specifications at all; words, meanings and patterns
arise naturally out of the topic and task and are supplied or explained by the teacher when needed,
in the same way as a subject teacher would.

You could also take as a starting point a set of simple tasks that are built around the use of
known words or cognates, and from this lead on to the study of naturally occurring phrases and
grammatical patterns - for examples, see Willis J 1996 (b): 119-123.

Mohan’s recommended starting point for ESL learners is topic and content (Mohan 1986 described
briefly in Nunan 1988: pp49-51) Each topic is then exploited systematically within a given
framework leading to the production of language teaching materials.

All these approaches have a rationale behind them which stems from what we knew or now know about
the 'how' of learning - revealing some truth in the third problem statement in 1.2 above. We will,
however, leave these 'how's and 'why's for discussion in Unit 2.


1.4 Influences on syllabus design

The process of designing a syllabus for a particular group of learners is actually a very practical
business, and common sense plays an important part. It is not in itself a theoretical field.
However, syllabus design is necessarily parasitic on other research and, as mentioned in the
previous section, theories of language learning and contemporary views on language are two such
areas. The more we know about language and its uses, the more alternatives we have for ways of
specifying language on our syllabus. The more we find out about how people best learn languages,
the more options we have for selecting and grading content and materials and choosing an
appropriate methodology to act as a vehicle for our syllabus. So whenever a new theory arises, it
should be examined carefully to see what implications it may have for language learning and
teaching.

Political and economic factors may also stimulate a change in syllabus design. For example, the
opening up of Eastern Europe in the early 1990s led to the demise of Russian teaching and a huge
demand for teachers able to teach English of an international nature, for trade and educational
links, and also for young learners. New syllabuses were needed for the ex-Russian teachers to
enable them both to learn English for international purposes and to learn new methods to teach it
to children.

Advances in technology have also contributed to change. In the past, the availability of tape
recorders, for example, and then language laboratories, certainly helped to popularise and
establish syllabuses based on Behaviourist principles - a little bit of language at a time, each
taught and ‘learnt’ to perfection. Now, computers enable huge corpora of language to be collected
and analysed; databases can be stored and updated with ease. This has enormous implications for
syllabus design.

Beliefs about the language learning process commonly affect language policy and course design. For
example, the belief that children can learn a foreign language better the younger they are has led
governments to lower the age for beginning a foreign language down to primary level - hence the
growing trend for the introduction of Primary English, with its subsequent 'knock-on' effects on
syllabuses right through the schools. It is not on our agenda at this point to discuss the pros and
cons of this, though I must add that according to some recent research, this is considered to be a
possibly mistaken belief - it all depends on what you mean by 'better' and on the conditions in
which the young learners are taught.

There are other factors that contribute to change in curriculum, syllabus and course design too.

Major factors that contribute to change in curriculum, syllabus and course design

LINGUISTIC THEORIES LEARNING THEORIES
changes in views of languages evidence about how people learn

POLITICAL/ECONOMIC PEDAGOGIC EXPERIENCE
SOCIAL CHANGE
long-term needs teachers’/students’ views
classroom research
testing

TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCES EDUCATIONAL VIEWS
e.g. ..... from other fields

OTHER?


1.5.2 Education or Training?
In an influential passage, Widdowson (1983) distinguishes between these two terms, not in any
absolute sense, but:

as a device for clarifying what seem to me to be important differences in pedagogic principle. This
device can be thought of as a scale, with training at one end and education at the other.

As regards training, Widdowson (p.17) quotes Peters approvingly:

.... a person could be a trained ballet-dancer or have mastered an eminently worthwhile skill, such
as pottery-making, without being educated. What might be lacking is something to do with knowledge
and understanding; for being educated demands more than being highly skilled. An educated man must
also possess some body of knowledge and some kind of conceptual scheme to raise this above the
level of a collection of disjointed facts. This implies some understanding of principles for the
organisation of facts. (1983:17)

This general distinction is in fairly common parlance in certain parts of the world (in the Gulf,
certainly). The idea is of education being long-term, somehow an end in itself, ranging broadly and
deeply across and into large areas, dealing with the fostering of abilities (this too is a familiar
distinction, subtly drawn by Widdowson); training on the other hand is in essence short-term, has a
predetermined and clearly specified purpose, and has as its aim the fostering of skills. Thus the
foundations of physics laid at school is a matter of education. Learning to be a plumber is a
matter of training.

Broad-based EGP is a matter of education, English for plumbers of training. There is a distinction
between the “practical deployment” (Widdowson’s phrase) associated with training skills, on a
course which examines no underlying principles, and the “knowledge and understanding of these
principles” (Widdowson again) which is typical of educational courses. The former is skill-based
(Widdowson, perhaps a little tendentiously, describes skills as “mechanical”, “a repertoire of
responses tagged with appropriate stimulus indicators”), the latter ability-based.

And Widdowson makes one further point, a very important one for his case. Pointing out that foreign
and second language teaching of any type is concerned with “skills” in Peters’ sense - in any class
you might have to give the English word for “table” or “screwdriver” and it is fatuous in the
extreme to seek here for an underlying principle at stake - he suggests:

an educational approach (that is, in ELT) is one which develops an understanding of principles in
order to extend the range of their application. A person educated in a certain language, as opposed
to one who is trained only in its use for a restricted set of predictable situations, is someone
who is able to relate what he or she knows to circumstances other than those which attended the
acquisition of that knowledge ... education in a language presupposes the internalisation of what
Halliday calls ‘meaning potential’. It is the ability to realise this potential that I refer to as
capacity.

Thus in sum:

training seeks to impose a conformity to certain established patterns of knowledge and behaviour,
usually in order to carry out a set of clearly defined tasks .... Education, however, seeks to
provide for creativity whereby what is learned is a set of schemata and procedures for adapting
them to cope with problems which do not have a ready-made formulaic solution.

This is the essence of Widdowson’s case. In one way it is sufficiently familiar to be
unexceptionable: but it is pointed with such subtlety that it bears considerable examination.


1.5.4 The syllabus as an empty shell

“Can we be so sure that all the knowledge we would like to be exposed to and gain from a syllabus
can be so clearly identified as items?” Consider the thrust of this: we can, and do, organise all
our teaching round - and in ESP often quite explicitly round - the notion of language needs. The
possibility of the student having other needs is something we recognise, but deal with only in the
most unprincipled of ways. At best, we will deal head on with the possibility that educationally
unsophisticated students may

there is nothing worse than for a TEFL teacher to think s/he is only a language teacher, yet most
syllabuses exist to reinforce the impression that language is all and only what the game is about.

The sylabus can act as a straitjacket. Where the class is taught generally as a group, in lockstep,
with everyone doing the same thing at the same time, it is inevitable that some will suffer from
this. The answer to this problem, of course, is to negotiate the syllabus at the start of the
course, and probably again during it on a number of occasions. The results of truly negotiated
syllabuses - ignoring for the moment as quite impossible a priori that such negotiations will
simply result in the teacher imposing his/her own wishes slowly and by argument rather than
suddenly and tacitly - are not, however, always recognisable as anything one would want to
recognise as a syllabus, particularly where repeated negotiation is concerned, precisely because
the notion of coherent, expert planning is at the heart of the matter.

If a syllabus is not in fact a commercially purchased coursebook, adherence to it is very often
sporadic, particularly if it is not backed up by a test which directly mirrors it, and indeed its
very existence may often be doubted, sometimes being replaced by nothing, sometimes by an ad hoc
collection of photocopied pages from a range of different sources, sometimes at least by the
accumulated wisdom of staff who have taught similar courses. Moreover, the strict procedure one
tends to find in diagrams, by which “Syllabus Design” happens at a precise and well-defined moment
of time (just after Needs Analysis) in the long, confident and stately advance from this last to
post-course Evaluation, is frequently a mirage - a point that Waters, (1997) makes strongly.

And just how often do we get a chance to design a syllabus or course from scratch? What normally
happens is that we adapt an existing course, or supplement a course with “new” materials to fulfil
the most recently identified objective.

Ultimately, syllabus design is a bit of a balancing act - it must surely involve careful
consideration of three major areas: it must take account of the learning situation, with its
resources and constraints but it must take also take account of how people learn languages, and -
equally important to my mind - it needs to identify what language will be useful for learners in
their target situation and ensure reasonable coverage of and exposure to that language. And I would
argue that this applies to all courses - whether they be for general or for specific purposes. But
it is up to you to come to your own decision - and justify this in the light of the theory and
evidence you have gained from your own practice, reading and reflection.

1.6 Audiences for syllabus statements
So far we have taken for granted that the syllabus is a document that teachers, learners and
text-book writers may want to refer to, but are there other possible audiences? To finish this
unit, you might like to think about the following task:

Zdroj (here the references can also be found:

http://www.philseflsupport.com/coursematerialsdesign.htm