Competencies

LANGUAGE CURRICULUM DESIGN AND TEACHER DEVELOPMENT

L. M. Kamysheva, MSc,
Senior Teacher of the Natural Science Departments
South Federal University, Russia

It is a fact that curriculum is very often understood as something very complicated and not always necessary for language teaching. In many cases it is just replaced by the content of the textbook available for the course. A lotof arguments justifying the necessity for curriculum development may be given, only the most important of them being presented in this paper.
First, curriculum may be considered to be an attempt at planning the teaching-learning process. It is quite obvious that the results of a planned process are usually more effective compared to the results of an unplanned process. Planning permits theteacher to foresee the process, which is going to be developed in the classroom, to create a system, where all the elements are interrelated. Secondly, curriculum design is inevitably connected with the writer´s view of the nature of language and language learning, which generally serves as the basic criterion for materials selection or production and the development of the whole process. Andfinally, designing a curriculum promotes not only effective classroom learning but also teacher development as well, something which undoubtedly should be considered as one of the most important elements leading to the improvement of higher education.
Language curriculum design is a part of language pedagogy, and so curriculum design has basically been discussed in the education rather than inthe linguistic literature, it has often been ignored by applied linguists. As a result curriculum theory has not found wide application in ELT practice yet; needless to say the application of this theory could be very beneficial for the whole ELT process improvement.
The essence of curriculum theory can be understood through the three following basic issues:
• The tendencies andapproaches to curriculum design.
• The stages of curriculum design.
• The principles of curriculum design.


1. The basic tendencies of language curriculum design


They were analyzed in the paper "ELT and Curriculum Theory Evolution"[Kamysheva, 1999: 13]. It is quite evident that the Classical Humanism Tendency is not compatible with Communicative LanguageTeaching. As far as Reconstructivist (product - oriented) and Progressivist (process - oriented) tendencies are concerned, both of them are valid for the process of language curriculum design, because on the one hand, it is impossible to elaborate curriculum without taking into account the aim and the objectives of learning; and on the other hand, stating objectives without working out the way ofachieving them does not seem to be either rational or reasonable.
So, the interdependence of product-oriented approach (skills-based curriculum) and process-oriented approach (task-based or procedural curriculum) is a vital principle of language curriculum design.


2. The stages of curriculum design


According to Long & Richards [quoted in Johnson, 1989: IX] languagecurriculum design is regarded as a decision - making process and involves:
▪ Policy making.
▪ Needs assessment.
▪ Design and development.
▪ Teacher preparation and development.
▪ Programme management and evaluation.


2.1. Policy making
Policy determination implies construction of political strategies withtaking account of contextual constraints and in many cases may be expressed in terms of the aim of the programme.
According to Nunan [1994] the aim of communicative language learning is achieving language proficiency based on the development of the four macro skills. It is quite natural that the level of language proficiency will be different for different contingents of learners and will...