GOALS AND OBJECTIVES

GOALS AND OBJECTIVES

1. Goals

   • general statements concerning desirable and attainable program purposes and aims based on perceived language and situation needs.
   • keep in mind
     • Goals are general statements of program purposes
     • goals should focus on what the program hopes to accomplish in the future, and particularly on what the students should be able to do when they leave the program.
     • Goals can serve as one basis for developing more precise and observable objectives
     • Goals should never be viewed as permanent, that is, they should never become set in cement

2. Objectives

   • specifíc statements that describe the particular knowledge, behaviors, and/ or skills that the learner will be expect~d to know or perform át the end of a course or program.
   • components
     • Performance
     • Conditions
     • Criterion
     • Subject
     • measure
   • Getting them on paper
     • Sources of ideas
       • Taxonomies
       • Other language programs
       • The literature
   • issues
     • Association With Behavioral Psychology
     • Sorne Things Just Cannot be Quantified
     • Objectives Trivialize lnstruction
     • Objectives Curtail a Teacher's freedom
     • language learning Cannot be Expressed in Objectives
   • Benefits
     • objectives help
       • teachers to convert the perceived needs of the students into teaching points.
       • to darify and organize their teaching points.
       • teachers to think through the skills and subskills underlying different instructional points
       • teachers to decide on what they want the students to be able to do at the end of instruction
       • teachers to decide on the appropriate level of specificity for the teaching activities that will be used
       • teachers to adopt, develop, or adapt teaching materials that maximally match the students' needs
       • teachers by providing a blueprint for the development of tests and other evaluation instruments
       • teachers to develop professionally by letting them focus on just what it is that they are trying to accomplish in the dassroom
       • teachers to evaluate each learner's progress, as well as overall program effectiveness, by permitting the systematic study, modification, and improvement of their perceptions of students' needs, course objectives, tests, materials, teaching, and evaluation procedures
       • teachers to contribute to and learn from an ongoing process of currículum development that draws on ·the collective energy and strengths of all of the teachers in a program to lessen the load of each individual.
   • Remember
     • Objectives can range in type and level of specificity
     • Objectives are not permanent.
     • Objectives must be developed by consensus among all of the teachers involved.
     • Objectives must not be prescriptive in terms of restricting what the teacher <loes in the dassroom to enable students to perform well by the end of the course.
     • Objectives will necessarily be specific to a particular program.
     • the objectives must be designed to help the teachers, not hinder their already considerable efforts in the classroom

3. The steps involved in narrowing the perceptions of students' needs to realizable program goals and, further, to instructional objectives.

   • 1. Examine the needs of the students as discovered and presented in the needs analysis documents.
   • 2. State the needs of the students in terms of realizable ·goals for the program.
   • 3. Narrow the scope of the resulting goal statements:
     • By analyzing them into their smallest units
     • By thinking through exactly what it is that the students need to know or be able to do to achieve the goals
     • By classifying those units into logical groupings
   • 4. State the smaller more specific goals as objectives with as much precision as makes sense in the context using the guidelines given in the remainder of this chapter