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The syllabus and student needs






The final shape of a syllabus may depend to a large extent on the needs ofthe students who are going to be taught. The syllabus for a group of agronomists might look very different from the syllabus for a group of waiters, as well as the one for a general English class will differ from the one for philologists.

The level of the students will be vital too, since we would expect a beginner syllabus to be very different from the one for advanced students.

The age of the students may have a lot to do with it as well, especially where the selection of themes and topics is concerned. No less important would be the number and sequence of academic hours and the number of students in a group.

Other factors will also play a part. They are the cultural and educational background of the students as well as the kind of institution they are studying in.

Depending on our students’ needs we may wish to restrict the syllabus in some way. For beginners we restrict the language in the syllabus. For science students doing postgraduate studies we may restrict the skills in the syllabus to mainly reading, although this is by no means certain. For waiters we may restrict the tasks and we may place a special emphasis on techniques of performing communication, e.g., simulation and role-play.

This course deals especially with general (mainstream) English. In that context we must read the issue of restriction with great care. Certainly, language may be restricted according to level. We may want to restrict our choice of topics and activities based on the kind of students we are going to teach. But this would only be in terms of suitability according to age and class size, etc. Teaching general English classes means that syllabus designers, materials writers and teachers have a wide range of possibility at their disposal.

One area in which we would not expect to impose restrictions is the area of language skills. We would want to include work on all four skills in our syllabus, in other words. Certainly, we might exclude some genres (e.g., writing technical reports, reading scientific articles) from our list. We might restrict our sub-skills based on level, but a general English course should be a four-skill course.

As far as the competing claims of the different kinds of syllabus are concerned, syllabus designers need to be able to organise all the elements we have talked about into a coherent whole. Any programme of language study should have a list of language to be taught (and in what order); a list of functions; a list of vocabulary; a list of themes and topics to be dealt with (and their situations they are to be dealt with in); a list of tasks and activities that are to be included. Whether you are designing the syllabus for a national education system or simply for your own class these are the issues that confront you (as we shall see when we look at lesson planning). The manner in which these lists are written may vary. The issue of which part of the syllabus is the main organising principle may not an important one. It is the interrelationship of all the elements that we plan for our students’ needs most adequately.


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