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Process Oriented Syllabuses

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25 views

Process Oriented Syllabuses

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fatima95dawood
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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PROCESS-ORIENTED

SYLLABUSES
OUTLINE
4.5 The Natural Approach
4.6 Syllabus Design and Methodology
4.7 Grading tasks
4.8 Conclusion
THE NATURAL APPROACH
• The Natural Approach has been most comprehensively described by Krashen
and Terrell in 1983 and is based on empirical research.
• The principles of the approach are:
 To develop basic communication skills.
 Comprehension precedes production
 Production emerges
 It promotes subconscious acquisition rather than conscious learning
 The affective filter is lowered.

• The authors also proposed a simple typology which divides learning goals into
two categories: basic personal communication skills and academic learning
skills, which can be further divided into oral and written modes.
• It is up for debate whether or not empirical evidence is needed to support the
principles of the Natural Approach and whether or not the approach is better
suited for basic personal communication skills or academic learning skills.
• Krashen and Terrell (1983) proposed that the development of communication
skills would lead to greater success in the development of academic learning
skills.
• They assumed that language consists of a single underlying psychological
skill, and that developing the ability to understand the radio would help
learners understand academic lectures.
• However, Breen (1985) argued that the social aspects of the learning
environment are also important and should not be ignored.
SYLLABUS DESIGN AND
METHODOLOGY
• The distinction between syllabus design and methodology has become
blurred with the development of process, task-based, and content
syllabuses.
• Widdowson (1987) has argued that a ‘syllabus’ is a specification of a
teaching programme which defines a particular subject for a particular group
of learners.
• Widdowson argues that the two syllabus archetypes, structural and
functional-notional, limit the syllabus designer's options.
• The former focuses on the formal properties of language, while the latter
focuses on replicating real-life communication.
• He suggests a methodological solution that would use problem-solving tasks
to engage learners while also referencing formal properties of language.

• Breen , on the other hand, claims that process considerations can be


considered the province of syllabus design.

• “an alternative orientation would prioritize the route itself: a focusing upon
the means towards the learning of new language. Here the designer would
give priority to the changing learning process and the potential of the
classroom………………………………………………………………………………
….it would be plan for thr activity within classroom group. (Breen, 1984)
GRADING TASKS
• Classroom activities are categorized according to the demands they make on
the learner.It is generally accepted that receptive skills such as listening and
reading are less demanding than productive skills such as speaking and
writing.

• Nunan (1985) offers a typology of activity types based on cognitive and


performance demands, which categorizes tasks according to type of learner
response.
• It is possible to use this typology to devise activities at different levels of
difficulty in order to exploit a given text or piece of source material.
• For ESP and content-based syllabuses, content can be graded with
reference to concepts associated with the subject in question, while Mohan's
knowledge framework grades task difficulty according to cognitive
complexity.

description sequencing choice

classification identification evaluation


GRADING LISTENING & SPEAKING
TASKS
• Brown and Yule (1983) suggest that listening tasks can be graded according
to speaker, intended listener, and content.
• Listening task which involves more than one speaker, which is not addressed
to the listener , and in which the topic is unfamiliar to the listener will be more
difficult to comprehend than a monologue on a familiar topic which is
addressed to the listener.
• As far as speaking tasks are concerned, Brown and Yule suggest that:

Easy tasks Difficult tasks


Short turns Long turns
Involve familiar individual Involve unfamiliar individual
Sympathetic individual Uninvolved individual
Familiar topic New topic
ANDERSON AND LYNCH: LISTENING IN
THIS SCHEME

Difficulty of a listening task depends on:


 The sequence in which information is presented
 The familiarity of the listener with the topic
 The explicitness of information in the text
 The type of input
 The type and scope of the task
 The amount of support
CONCLUSION
• Process oriented syllabuses do not necessarily mean that they exclude a
specification of what learners should be able to do as result of instruction,
rather grammatical, functional and notional elements are considered as a
second-order activity.
• With adoption of procedural, task-based, content-based and non-linguistic
approaches, the distinction between syllabus design and methodology
becomes blurred.

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