Syllabus and design

SYLLABUS DESIGN: PRINCIPLES

INTRODUCTION

In the first unit we made a distinction between curriculum and syllabus. To use a travel metaphor, the curriculum is the purpose of the journey - what we hope to get out of it-while the syllabus is the itinerary itself. In Unit 2, we looked at two major philosophies that have influenced curriculum decisions, and saw how these philosophies (orparadigms) affect choice of method, choice of teaching style, and, finally, choice of syllabus. A distinction was made between what are called Type A syllabuses -that is, syllabuses of pre-selected, discrete-items of language- and Type B syllabuses, which focus less on the products of learning than on the process, and are typically realised by a sequence of tasks. In either case, the designer ofa syllabus is faced with two sets of decisions: what to put in to it, and in what order.
Before examining and critiquing different syllabus types, it will pay to look more closely, therefore, at the issue of selection and grading.

SELECTION AND GRADING

Syllabus design usually starts with an organising principle: will the syllabus be organised around grammatical structures? Or functionalareas? Or topics? Or perhaps a combination of all three? The organising principle will be influenced by curriculum philosophy and, specifically, beliefs about the nature of language. If grammar is considered as a pre-requisite for language proficiency, the organising principle may be grammatical. If, on the other hand, communicative competence is prioritised, the organising principle may be acommunicative one, such as language functions. We will be looking at these different types of syllabus in more depth in the next unit.
Having decided on the organising principle, two basic decisions are implicated in the design of a syllabus: what to put into it? and in what order? These decisions are known respectively as selection and grading. Just as the syllabus can be thought of as the itineraryfor a journey, the first planning decision is "Where shall we go?" and then, "Where shall we go first? And then after that? And after that?"
Factors influencing the choice and order of the items in a syllabus can be broken down into two main groups: utility and learnability. That is, all things being equal, the item which is most useful for the learner is included in the syllabus and the items thathave relatively little usefulness are rejected. Similarly, items that are relatively easy to learn are preferred to more difficult ones. A standard measure of an item's learnability is its complexity, i.e. the more simple, the easier to learn. Inevitably, there may be a trade-off between usefulness and learnability, since a useful item may not always be a simple one, and vice versa. Nevertheless,Type A syllabuses, in particular, characteristically start with simple and useful items, before graduating to more complex and less useful ones later.

Frequency, range, and coverage
Let's look at the criterion of utility in more detail. What makes a syllabus item useful? An important factor is its frequency: the more frequently the item occurs in real language use, the more useful itpotentially is.
Frequency has been studied particularly with relation to vocabulary: given the enormous number of words in any language, it makes sense to select only those which have a high frequency of occurrence, especially at the early stages of learning. Computer data bases -or corpora- have been particularly helpful in supplying information about word frequency. Table 3.1, for example, is a list ofthe 50 most frequent words in both written and spoken English, according to two (relatively small) corpora:
Written Spoken

Table 3.1: From Schmitt & McCarthy (1997: 23-24).

One problem with such lists is that, if interpreted rigorously, they could lead to syllabusing decisions that would run...