Effective Curriculum for Teaching L2 Writing

Principles and Techniques

Eli Hinkel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781136820335
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Effective Curriculum for Teaching L2 Writing sets out a clear big picture for curricular thinking about L2 writing pedagogy and offers a step-by-step guide to curriculum design with practical examples and illustrations. Its main purpose is to help pre-service and practicing teachers design courses for teaching academic writing and to do this as efficiently and effectively as possible. Bringing together the what and the how-to with research-based principles, what sets this book apart is its overarching focus on language pedagogy and language building.

Part 1 examines curricular foundations in general and focuses on what is socially valued in L2 writing and pedagogy at school and at the college and university level. Part 2 is concerned with the nitty-gritty?—the daily realities of curricular design and classroom instruction. Part 3 takes a close look at the key pedagogical ingredients of teaching academic L2 writing: vocabulary and collocations, grammar for academic writing, and down-to-earth techniques for helping L2 writers to organize discourse and ideas. The Appendix provides an extensive checklist for developing curricula for a course or several courses in language teaching.

Part I
Curriculum Foundations for L2 Writing and Language

1
Introduction

Effective Teaching and the Curriculum

This chapter discusses:

• A curriculum for teaching
• Curriculum design and access to education
• The essentials of a curriculum design
• Contemporary views on curriculum and teaching effectiveness
• Building an effective curriculum for teaching L2 writing

Introduction

The intense debates about teacher effectiveness and the characteristics that make for good teaching are not likely to be resolved in the near future. It may be that all the claims about the component elements of excellent teaching are correct and valid, and that the key question concerns their proper mix at the appropriate time.

As in all other human endeavors, though, in second language (L2) teaching one needs to keep an eye on the big picture while being mindful of the incremental tasks that comprise the daily pursuits of virtually all teachers. That is, in the space of a day, a week, or a school term, teachers have to be able to move from point A to point B relatively effectively and efficiently, while keeping their wits about them in the long run. Like all other human beings who work for a living, teachers need to see that what they do day in and day out actually makes at least some positive difference in their students’ learning and skills (see Darling-Hammond, 2010, for a discussion on teacher efficacy).

To achieve progress, improvement, growth, advancement—a positive difference—in student L2 abilities, teachers have to keep what they do in perspective. That is, they need to see connections among the students they teach, the material that they teach, and the goals with which they teach this material to these students. In the debates on teacher effectiveness and the characteristics of excellent teaching, as well as those on student learning, a broad view of the connections among the learners, the learning, and the purposes of teaching has been often referred to as “a curricular perspective” or “curricular thinking” (e.g., Byrnes, 1998; Darling-Hammond, 2005, 2006; Grandin, Einbeck, & von Reinhart, 1992).

In today’s global and migratory society, which is especially relevant in L2 teaching, the types of learners, contexts, objectives, contents, sociocultural frameworks, and available resources for learning are enormously diverse. Thus, for teachers, it is more important than ever to analyze, identify, appraise, evaluate, select, and structure the contents of teaching, the attendant concepts and materials, and the suitable teaching methods and techniques. Accomplishing these complex intellectual tasks and teaching effectively requires curricular thinking. Effective teaching cannot—and does not—take place without a curriculum that has a clear view of the inter-relationships between the learners, the multi-layered objectives of teaching, the societal goals of education, and the subject matter contents.

A Curriculum for Teaching

In L2 teaching, as with other subjects, such as math or social studies, a curriculum is often seen as something very vague. Although most L2 teachers have course plans, syllabi, or required topic areas to cover in their classes, the concept of a curriculum is not something that many people spend a great deal of time thinking about. However, it is the curriculum that practically always determines whether instruction, the content, or the implementation of the teaching activities result in effective teaching and lead to productive student learning.

Speaking generally, most people who teach have very different ideas of what a curriculum is, where it comes from, or how it comes into being. Some might say that a curriculum is the material that a course or a program of study is expected to cover in a certain amount of time.

Others might claim that a curriculum refers to a specific subject matter or set of skills that students need to acquire. That is, it is what students should know, or be able to describe or do to meet the expectations of the society in the form of, say, school administrators, parents, or testing agencies.

The methods for instruction, teaching techniques, classroom activities, the subject matter, the content areas, course syllabi, and guidelines for material sequencing do in fact refer to various concepts that are intrinsic to a curriculum. However, these elements of instruction and education are only loosely associated with what a curriculum is, how it is developed, and what its educational objective can be.

A dictionary definition of the term “curriculum” is, in fact, also rather vague: “an aggregate of all the courses of study offered by a school, college, or university,” or “a group of related courses, often in a special field of study: the engineering curriculum” (Webster, 1996, p. 492). However, in his well-known and thorough book, Analyzing the Curriculum, George Posner provides the definitions of at least six concepts that, taken together, typically refer to academic curriculum. Each of these “has different consequences in terms of accountability” because “no definition of curriculum is ethically or politically neutral” (Posner, 2004, p. 12).

Common Components of Academic Curriculum

• Scope and Sequence of language skill development. THIS IS THE FOUNDATIONAL AND MOST ESSENTIAL GUIDE OF A CURRICULUM FOR INSTRUCTION AND ASSESSMENT.
  • Curricular objectives to determine the scope and the goal of teaching and learning (or learning outcomes) expected at each of the sequential levels of language proficiency or school grades.
  • Objectives are typically organized in sequence, according to a common language skill/dimension (i.e., scope; e.g., listening, speaking, reading, or writing) or sub-skill (e.g., note-taking).
• A Course Plan (also called syllabus): A COURSE OUTLINE ENCOMPASSES THE GOALS AND THE MEANS FOR ACHIEVING THEM (i.e., the what and the how of the course). These elements also include the rationale, topics to be addressed, teaching materials, assignments, and assessment/evaluation criteria.
  • COMPONENTS OF A COURSE PLAN can include:
  • Language/content coverage to meet the curricular objectives: An organized set of subject matter topics that are to be covered. Standards, which can be internally or externally determined: The types of knowledge and skills required of students for successful completion. Standards, however, do not delineate teaching methods, techniques, or activities. Standards, for example, can help distinguish between what represents beginning, intermediate, or advanced language skills. Standards may be an incremental step toward achieving curricular objectives.
  • Instructional materials: Textbooks, workbooks, study guides, teaching manuals, lab and supplementary materials, and assessment instruments or tests that are used to guide instruction and evaluation.
• Overall Course of Study: A set or series of courses that a student is required to complete to achieve their language learning objectives. WELL-DESIGNED CURRICULUM ENTAILS COORDINATING INSTRUCTION WITHIN AND ACROSS LANGUAGE LEARNING LEVELS (e.g., coordinated teaching within beginning level skills, such as reading and writing, as well as coordinated teaching across beginning and intermediate reading levels).
  • Course of Study can apply to, for example, a specific level of language proficiency (e.g., beginning level courses—listening, speaking, reading, and writing) in some cases. This concept can also refer to the entire instructional sequence and language learning process (e.g., beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels that encompass all required language skills).

Based on Posner (2004)

Curriculum Design and Access to Education

The quandary of what a curriculum is or how it impacts the effectiveness of teaching is certainly not new. To begin with, a curriculum at any level of education and at any period in history has always been a social, cultural, ideological, economic, and political endeavor. Today, it seems largely axiomatic that social values, cultural norms and expectations, and the state of a national economy in any country determine what is valued or devalued in education. As with most other social, cultural, and economic phenomena, the political aspects of human functioning and matters of ideology play an integral role.

Much of our current and predominant view of the values and objectives in education is rooted in the humanistic social outlook that took hold in the 1930s and 1940s. On the heels of the Great Depression, during World War II, and in response to rigid secondary and university curricula, American educators and social economists actively sought to liberalize access to higher education. In the early 1930s, a consortium of government and funding agencies commissioned a landmark Eight-Year Study of curriculum effectiveness and learning outcomes in terms of high school to university transition for middle-class students and without the gate-keeping function of entrance exams. Ralph Tyler, a professor from the University of Chicago, spearheaded a national study of 30 high schools and 300 colleges and universities to identify the characteristics of effective curricula that could provide such students access to university education. To this day, the landmark Eight-Year Study is considered to be the most comprehensive and reliable investigation of the role of the curriculum in the democratization of education and curricular development.

In the late 1940s, nearly a decade after the study was completed, Tyler published a small, 83-page book, titled Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction (Tyler, 1949). Since its original publication, the book has undergone 38 new editions, countless attempts of a reformulation of its principles, and scores of re-interpretations. Nonetheless, Tyler’s principles have continued to dominate much of the educational thought in curriculum design and development possibly because these frameworks fundamentally reflect the social assumptions and cultural values that lie at the core of Western schooling and education (Posner, 2004).

The Tyler approach to curriculum planning centers on four rationales germane to the perspectives on education in his time. However, Tyler’s first “fundamental question” (1949, p. 3) has had an encompassing and profound influence on education and curricular schools of thought because it clearly formulates an approach to uncovering the crucial elements in all types of school...