Syllabus design

Hi guys,

Here is the summary of the four concepts kept in mind when designing a syllabus. See you in class!

LEARNABILITY

This concept explains that some structural or lexical items are easier for students to learn than others.

Based on this concept we teach easier things first and then increase the level of difficulty as students’ language level rises.

This concept might tell us that, at beginner levels, it is better to teach uses of was and were immediately after teaching uses of is and are, rather than follow is and are with the third conditional.

FREQUENCY

This concept tells us that it would make sense, especially at beginning levels, to include items which are more common in the language, than ones that are only used occasionally by native speakers.

Thanks to this concept we are in a position to say with some authority, for example, that SEE is used more often than UNDERSTAND, than it is to denote vision (e.g. Oh, I see). It might make sense, therefore, to teach that meaning of SEE first.

COVERAGE

 This concept explains that some words and structures have greater scope for use than others.

We might decide, on the basis of this concept, to introduce GOING TO future before the present continuous with the future reference, if we could show that GOING TO could be used in more situations than the present continuous.

  

USEFULNESS

 This concept explains the reason that words like BOOK and PEN figure so highly in classrooms (even though they might not be that frequent in real language use) is because they are words normally used in that situation.

This concept helps understand that words for family members occur early on in a student’s learning life because of the context of what students are linguistically able to talk about.