CURRICULUM AND MATERIAL DEVELOPMENT

The Quest of New Methods

There was much greater mobility of peoples as a result of growth in air
travel and International tourism. English increasingly important in
International trade and commerce.

The initial response of English-language teaching profession was to explore

new directions in methodology. The methodology had the following
characteristics:

A structure syllabus with graded vocabulary levels.

Meaningful presentation of structures in contexts through the use of
situations to contextualize new teaching points.
A sequence of classroom activities that went from Presentation, to
controlled Practice, to freer Production (the PPP method).

Language learning was thought to depend on habits the could be

established by repetition. The linguist Bloomfield (1942,12) had earlier
stated a principle that became a core tenet of audiolingualism: Language
learning is over learning : anything less is of on use.

Changing Needs for Foreign Languages in Europe

In 1969, the Council of Europe promotes the more effective learning of
foreign languages within the community, decided that:

If full understanding is to be achieved among the countries of Europe,

the language barriers between them must be removed;
Linguistics diversity is part of the European cultural heritage and that it
should, through the study of modern languages, provide a source of
intellectual enrichment rather than an obstacle to unity;
According to Council of Europe 1969:8, only if study of modern
European languages becomes general will full mutual understanding
and corporation be possible in Europe.
English for Specific Purposes
The concern to make language courses more relevant to learners
needs also led during this period to the emergence of the Languages for
specific Purposes (LPS) movement, known in English-language teaching circle
as ESP (English for Specific Purpose). The ESP approach to language teaching
began as a response to a number of practical concerns:

The need to prepare growing numbers of non-English background

students for study at American and British University from the 1950s.
The need to prepare materials to teach students who had already
mastered general English, but know needed for use in employment,
such as non-English background doctors, nurses, engineers, and
scientists.
The need for materials for people needing English for business
purposes.
The need to teach immigrants the language needed to deal with job
situations.

Overall the 1970s the ESP approach in language teaching drew on register
analysis and discourse analysis to determine the linguistic characteristics of
different disciplines such as medicine, engineering, or science.

Need Analysis in ESP

An important principle of ESP approaches to language teaching is that
the purposes for which a learner needs a language rather than a syllabus
reflecting the structure of general English should be used in planning an
English course. In ESP, learners needs are often described in terms of
performance, that is, in terms of what the learner will be able to do
with the language at the end of a course of study.

Whereas in a general English course the goal is usually overall mastery

of the language that can be tested on a global language test, the goal of an
ESP course is to prepare the learners to carry out a specific task or set of
tasks for their future.
Communicative Language Teaching (CLT)
Communicative language teaching (CLT) is a broad approach to
teaching that resulted from a focus on communication as the organizing
principle for teaching rather than a focus on mastery of the grammatical
system of the language.

Wilkins described the traditional type of grammar-based syllabus

as a synthetic approach. A synthetic approach is contrasted with an
analytic approach. Analytic approaches are behavioral (through not
behaviorist). They are organized in terms of the purposes for which people
are learning languages and the kinds of language performance that are
necessary to meet those purposes.

Emergence of A Curriculum Approach in Language

Teaching
A curriculum in a school context refers to the whole body of knowledge
that children acquire in schools. Rodgers (1989,27) observes that the
curricular system-design model has been prescriptive and rule-driven. It
describes a linear sequence of events comprising formulation of objectives,
selection of content, task analysis, design of learning activities, definition of
behavioral outcomes and evaluative measures for determining the
achievement or non-achievement of these outcomes.

Curriculum development is used in this book to refer to the

range of planning and implementation processes involved in
developing or renewing a curriculum. These processes focus on need
analysis, situational analysis, planning learning outcomes, course
organization, selecting and preparing teaching materials, providing for
effectives teaching, and evaluation.