A framework of course development processes

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A framework of course development processes

1. Needs assessment: What are my students needs? How can I assess them so that I can address them?
2. Determining goals and objectives: What are the purposes and intended outcomes of the couse? What will my students need to do or to learn to achieve these goals?
3. Conceptualizing content: What will be the backbone of what I teach? What will I include in my syllabus?
4. Selecting and developing materials and activities: How and with what will I teach the course? What is my role? What are my students’ roles?
5. Organization of content and activities: How will I organize the content and activities? What systems will I develop?
6. Evaluation: How will I assess what students have learned? How will I assess the effectiveness of the course?
7. Consideration of resources and constraints: What are the givens of my situation?

Needs assessment

Needs assessment involves finding out what the learners know and can do and what they need to learn or do so that the course can bridge the gap (or some part of it).

One way of conceptualizing needs is to distinguish between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ needs.

Objective needs are derivable from different kinds of factual information about learners, their use of language in real-life communication situations as well as their current language proficiency and language difficulties.

Subjective needs are the cognitive and affective needs of the learner in the learning situation, derivable from information about affective and cognitive factors, such as personality, confidence, attitudes, learners’ wants and expectations with regard to the learning of English and their individual cognitive style and learning strategies.

Determining goals and objectives

Goals are general statements of the overall, long-term purposes of the course.

Objectives express the specific ways in which the goals will be achieved.

Why set goals and objectives? Setting goals and objectives provides a sense of direction and a coherent framework for the teacher in planning her course.

Stern (1992) proposes four types of goals for language learners:

1. Proficiency goals: include general competency, mastery of the four skills, or mastery of specific language behaviors.
2. Cognitive goals: include mastery of linguistic knowledge and mastery of cultural knowledge.
3. Affective goals: include achieving positive attitudes and feelings about the target language, achieving confidence as a user of language, and achieving confidence in oneself as a learner.
4. Transfer goals: involve learning how to learn so that one can call upon learning skills gained in one situation to meet future learning challenges.

Conceptualizing content

Two decades ago, language teaching was still heavily influenced by a structural view of language.

Much has changed in recent years in the fields of applied linguistics and language acquisition and in approaches to language teaching. The proficiency movement, the concept and various models of communicative competence, the advent of ESP (English for Specific Purposes), the proliferation of methods of language teaching, and the diversification of the population of English learners has all provided the teacher with many more options to consider in deciding what will be the backbone of her course.