How To Organize a Course

Organizing a Course: Just a list of contents?
As learning a foreign or a second language has become mandatory all around the world more and more people are obliged to choose when, where and how to study it, which is a thorny issue. Nowadays learners of all ages are learning a language that is not their mother tongue. Their motives could vary from personal interests to academic or businesspurposes. Their learning contexts also differ from one culture to another. The context in which a language is taught has an important impact on the learners´ successful. Learners´ motivation also plays a significant role in the process of learner a foreign or a second language. In this way learners are forced to look for the most suitable English program that cope their needs. But some importantquestions arise from this issue. As I cannot analyze all of them, I just want to mention two, which are going to guide my reflection: the first one is, why organize a course? And, how does one decide on an appropriate organization? To my view, two important aspects have been left apart when organizing or designing courses: learning styles and beliefs about how to learn and teach a foreign/secondlanguage.
Although the former question seems ease to answer, it actually is not. Most of the cases, a course follows a syllabus which does not face or cope what learners need and without take into account several important aspects such as the context in which the foreign/second language is taught, the contents and their relationship with the goals, the approach, among other. In this particular caseorganization means have a plan. This plan is design under some basis such as selection of contents, grading or sequencing those contents, and negotiation. The former one is obvious, one cannot teach everything, so it is necessary to delimit the amount of knowledge to be taught. The second base, sequencing, has to do with what goes first and then in the process of learning. The last one, it involveswhat every single course has to have: flexibility. In other words, it is adapt or enrich the course design with learners´ ´proposals. A plan is always “a way to bridge the goals and objectives” (Kathleen, 2000) with the basis before mentioned.

The second question, how to decide on an appropriate organization, is a little bit more complex than the first one because it “depends on a number offactors which include the course content, the goals and objectives, the background, students’ needs, the method or the text, and the context” (Kathleen, 2000), among other. Those factors have to be connected among them in harmony; otherwise, they would be like pieces of different puzzles. For example, according to Kathleen (2000) the contents of a course have a close relationship with the goals andobjectives since they are what students expect to learn. If those aspects do not have a close relation, students’ success is not likely to happen. It is not my main goal go deeper in each of these factors but I want to focus on two, which are consider the most relevant and at the same time the most omitted when deciding how to organize a course: learners´ needs and the course organizer background andbeliefs.
When someone registers in an English program is hardly asked about their needs, their interests and styles. It seems that most of English programs, at least in Colombia, are design to “ideal” learners. Luckily, during last decade, several efforts have been made to change this situation. Increasingly since then, house publishers, institutions, and even universities have become aware oftaking into account students´ needs and interest is the best way to success. Nowadays, we can find a range of programs that cover different needs such as ESP, Business English, Reading Comprehension in English, Academic Writing, among other. The idea with those programs is to cover specific needs since as I said before is impossible to teach everything. The experience has shown that one of the...