Goals, Content and Sequencing

Goals, Content and Sequencing

The aim of this part of the curriculum design process is to make a list of the items to teach in the order in which they will be taught.

Content and sequencing must take account of the environment in which the course will be used, the needs of the learners, and principles of teaching and learning.

Goals and content

The goals of a language lesson can focus on one or more of the following: Language, Ideas, Skills or Text (Discourse). It is possible to plan or evaluate the content of courses by looking at each of these four areas. Within each of these four areas, choices have to be made regarding the units for planning and checking the course. Even if the selection of content for a course is based on topics, themes or situations, it is useful to check to see that the language items that are covered are the most useful ones. Making sensible, well-justified decisions about content is one of the most important parts of curriculum design. If poor content is chosen, then excellent teaching and learning result in a poor return for learning effort.

Units of progression in the course

They are the items that are used to grade the progress of the course. If the starting point of a course was topics, then the units of progression would also be topics with progress through the course being marked by an increasing number of topics covered. The units of progression can be classified into two types – those that progress in a definite series, such as vocabulary levels, and those that represent a field of knowledge that could be covered in any order, such as topics. Although certain units of progression may be used to select and sequence the material in a course, it is useful to check that other units are covered in the course and that other units are at an appropriate level.

What will the progression be used for?

The units of progression can be used for a variety of purposes:

1.    Units of progression can be used to set targets and paths to those targets.

2.    Units of progression can be used to check the adequacy of selection and ordering in a course.

3.    Units of progression can be used to monitor and report on learners’ progress and achievement in the course.

Vocabulary:

There is considerable frequency-based research that provides clear indications of what vocabulary learners would gain most benefit from knowing. The low-frequency vocabulary of the language (vocabulary not in the most frequent 2,000 words or in the academic wordlist) does not deserve teaching effort. Rather, strategies for dealing with and learning this vocabulary should receive the teacher’s attention.

Grammar:

Many courses use grammar as the major unit of progression. Unfortunately the selection and sequencing of the items is at the best opportunistic and gives no consideration of the value of learning particular items. Courses thus include a strange mixture of very useful items and items that occur relatively infrequently in normal language use. Infrequent items can be usefully introduced in courses where they are needed to be learned as memorized phrases (lexicalized sentence stems) rather than as structures to focus on.

Functions:

There is no standard list of language functions that is accompanied by frequency data. The most widely available list of functions can be found in Van Ek and Alexander (1980) and is organized under the six headings of:

1.    Imparting and seeking factual information

2.    Expressing and finding out intellectual attitudes

3.    Expressing and finding out emotional attitudes

4.    Expressing and finding out moral attitudes

5.     Getting things done (suasion)

6.    Socializing.

Discourse:

Attention to elements of spoken discourse, such as ellipsis between speakers and negotiation of discourse, may occur early in language courses but is rarely the unit of progression for a course.

Skills, subskills, and strategies:

Some courses use skills and subskills as their units of progression. Reading courses for example may focus on skills such as finding the main idea, reading for detail, notetaking, skimming, reading faster, and reading for inferences. There are three major ways of defining subskills. One is to look at the range of activities covered by a skill such as speaking and to use these as a starting point for defining subskills. Another way is to look at the skill as a process and to divide it into the parts of the process. This is a typical way of approaching writing, dividing the writing process into parts. One possible division of the process is: (1) having a model of the reader, (2) having writing goals, (3) gathering ideas, (4) organizing ideas, (5) turning ideas into written text, (6) reviewing what has just been written, and (7) editing the written text. Process divisions can be applied in other skills.

A third way of dividing up a skill is to use levels of cognitive activity. The most well-known approach of this kind can be found in what is popularly known as Bloom’s taxonomy (Bloom, 1956). Bloom divides cognitive activity into six levels of increasing complexity: (1) knowledge, (2) comprehension, (3) application, (4) analysis, (5) synthesis, (6) evaluation.

These levels have often been applied to the construction of reading comprehension activities.

Ideas

A good language course not only develops the learners’ control of the language but also puts the learners in contact with ideas that help the learning of language and are useful to the learners. The choice of the ideas content of a course will have a major effect on the marketability and acceptability of the course. It needs very careful consideration and application of the findings of needs analysis and environment analysis.

Task - based syllabuses

With the shift to communicative language teaching in the 1970s there was an increasing emphasis on using language to convey a message, and as a result increasing attention was given to the use of tasks in the classroom. The realization that many so-called communicative language courses were still largely based upon a sequence of language forms in turn generated interest in task-based, rather than task-supported, syllabuses. task-based syllabus, particularly Long and Crookes (1992), argue that pedagogic tasks provide a vehicle for presentation of appropriate language samples to learners and allow negotiation of difficulty. They suggest that the most appropriate tasks are those that a needs analysis determines are most useful for the learners.

Sequencing the content in a course

The lessons or units of a course can fit together in a variety of ways. The two major divisions are whether the material in one lesson depends on the learning that has occurred in previous lessons (a linear development) or whether each lesson is separate from the others so that the lessons can be done in any order and need not all be done (a modular arrangement).

Linear approaches to sequencing

Most language courses involve linear development, beginning with simple frequent items that prepare for later more complex items. Such a development has the disadvantages of not easily taking account of absenteeism, learners with different styles and speeds of learning, and the need for recycling material. The worst kind of linear development assumes that once an item has been presented in a lesson, it has been learned and does not need focused revision. This view does not agree with the findings of research on memory (Baddeley, 1990) and there are variations of linear progressions which try to take account of the need for repetition.

Developing a spiral curriculum involves deciding on the major items to cover, and then covering them several times over a period of time at increasing levels of detail.

A modular approach to sequencing

We have been looking at linear approaches to sequencing and ways of ensuring repetition within a linear approach. The second major type of approach, a modular approach, breaks a course into independent non-linear units.

These units may be parts of lessons, lessons or groups of lessons. Each unit or module is complete in it and does not usually assume knowledge of previous modules. It is not unusual for a modular approach to be accompanied by criterion-referenced testing with a high level of mastery set as the criterion.

In language courses the language could be divided into modules in several ways. The modules could be skill-based with different modules for listening, speaking, reading and writing, and sub-skills of these larger skills. The modules could be based on language functions, or more broadly situations, dealing with the language needed for shopping, emergency services, travel, the post office and the bank.

Modular courses often have some kind of division into obligatory or core modules, and optional or elective modules, or a division into level 1 modules and level 2 modules and so on.