The ELT Curriculum: A Flexible Model for a Changing World.

The ELT Curriculum: A Flexible Model for a Changing World.

1. INTRODUCTION

   • Language is communication, and as teachers we must develop in our learners the ability to communicate effectively in a wide range of professional and social contexts.

2. CURRICULUM:ADEFINITION

   • Applied linguistics, a similar definition of curriculum is proposed by Richards, Platt and Platt :
     • a. the educational purposes of the programme (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 participants within the curriculum design process:
       • The planners.
       • The administrators.
       • The teachers.
       • The learners.

3. MODELS OF CURRICULUM PLANNING

   • The three traditions are identified as:
     • Classical Humanism.
     • Reconstructionism.
     • Progressivism.

4. THE CONTENT MODEL: CLASSICAL HUMANISM

   • The attraction of the model is that it provides:
     • 3. Accountability
     • 1. Clarity of goals
     • 2. Ease of evaluation

5. THE OBJECTIVES MODEL: RECONSTRUCTIONISM

   • The purpose of education from the point of view of the process model is to enable the individual to progress towards self-fulfilment.
   • “communicative revolution” and a period of “piecemeal reconstruction”, is now characterised by “a growing interest in the curriculum process as a whole, attempts to put language teaching back in touch with educational theory in general and curriculum studies in particular”
   • Johnson refers to the communicative ‘revolution’, and a revolution cannot be achieved without a certain degree of chaos before reconstruction

6. THE PROCESS MODEL: PROGRESSIVISM

   • Kelly sums:
     • the fact that neither offers any real help with that decision which must precede all others, namely the choice of content and/or aims and objectives

7. THE ‘NEW PRAGMATISM’: A MIXED-FOCUS CURRICULUM

   • CURRICULUM POLICY
     • NEEDS ANALYSIS
       • SYLLABUS DESIGN
         • METHODOLOGY
           • Of curriculum planning and implementation, and involve all participants. The primary purpose of evaluation is to determine whether or not the curriculum goals have been met
         • EVALUATION
           • Interaction between the teacher and the learners in the classroom, and on the teaching approaches, activities, materials and procedures employed by the teacher.
       • Brindley suggests that two orientations are now generally recognised:
         • 1. A narrow, product-oriented view of needs which focuses on the language necessary for particular future purposes and is carried out by the ‘experts’
         • 2. A broad, process-oriented view of needs which takes into account factors such as learner motivation and learning styles as well as learner-defined target language behaviour
   • Dubin and Olshtain, three areas are central to the concept of a communicative curriculum:
     • a humanistic approach in education
     • a cognitively based view of language learning
     • a view of the nature of language as seen by the field of .sociolinguistics

8. CONCLUSION

   • The language teaching profession has yet to embrace curriculum development as an overall approach to the planning of teaching and learning.

Bilder und Dateien der Mindmap