Research-driven Curriculum Design

Developing a Language Course

Gülçin Mutlu, Ali Yildirim

• Publisher: Verlag Barbara Budrich
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783847417446
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica delle lingue

Die Untersuchung der Kursgestaltung ist eine wichtige empirische Art der Forschung. Allerdings vernachlässigen Kursdesigner*innen oft die akademischen Richtlinien in der Lehrplantheorie und -entwicklung. Diese Studie über Lehrplangestaltung und Kursdesign für Englisch als Fremdsprache (English as a Foreign Language, EFL) verbindet die Theorie mit der Praxis und bietet einen praktischen Leitfaden für Lehrer*innen bei der Planung von Fremdsprachenkursen.

1. Introduction

The purpose of the study reported in this book is to develop an advanced level speaking course that will be offered to the freshman students successfully completing the English preparatory program, which was composed of more than 700 hours of English instruction. This target population of students spends their first year of university at the preparatory English school and they have to successfully complete the preparatory school before they start their main faculties. The students at all preperatory classes usually start with the elementary level of proficiency, and they are expected to move towards an upper level of proficiency level within a whole academic year and finally graduate with an upper intermediate to advanced levels of proficiencies. The students are usually aged between 18 and 20 at the preparatory class, and thus for the year that this speaking course is to be offered, students are expected to be generally aged between 19 and 21. To our experience at several universities in Turkey, these students start university after having been exposed to a highly traditional high school period and school culture. That is, they are accustomed to seeing the teacher as an authority as a figure who always provides them with step-by-step explanations of what they are going to do in class. Given the interactional patterns in the classrooms, based upon their earlier experiences at the high schools, they are not very attentive and willing to work with others for their classroom tasks. However, as they spend a relatively more time in the language classroom, they are observed to change their attitudes to a great extend in comparison to their first weeks and behave in a more relaxed and cooperative manner in the classrooms. Therefore, when they come to the advanced speaking course to be designed for the purposes of this study, they are expected to be already accustomed to a cooperative classroom environment, to teachers behaving like a theater director and guide (not like an authority) and treating the students as active course participants. The course to be designed was named as “Further Speaking Course” (FSC) as the main purpose of this course to make students further their speaking abilities that they have already developed a certain level at the preperatory classes. Hence, this course is built upon the understanding that the target students have a certain level of proficiency in English with regard to language forms, lexical knowledge, use of conversational strategies and registers in communication, and certain level of writing and speaking skills in English.

Given the contextual characteristics, the medium of instruction at the university where we designed this course was Turkish in general. However, the courses are offered with the medium of English on a partial basis in some of the departments and the preperatory class is compulsory for these departments. That is, for some departments, the students study 30 % of the courses in their faculty curriculum in English. The course we attempted to design in this project will be offered to those departments that offer their degree curricula partially in English (i.e. with 30 % of English instruction). This course to be designed in this study will be offered as an elective course for those students who want to further develop their speaking skills. However, in the long run, there may be some departments at the university that will offer all of the degree courses with the medium of English, and in this case, the course to be designed can be offered as a must course. The Further Speaking Skills course will meet for four hours a week in the fall term of an academic year when the students start their degree studies upon the successful completion of the preparatory school. This makes a period of approximately four months for the course.

The English preparatory program is a strict program in which students receive instruction concerning all of the four major skills (listening, writing reading and speaking) and the three sub-skills (grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation) of language. Though we follow a communicative approach to language teaching with a focus upon all four major language skills at the preperatory class from the very beginning of the preperatory semester, it takes time for students to come to a level of production in language for both oral and written purposes. To our experience, their competence (knowledge about the language) precedes their performance (use of the language). However, once they have gained the necessary competence and input in English, they are expected to proceed very well. In this regard, as researchers and teachers we assume that these students develop their competencies to a great extent at the preparatory program; however, they still need more practice for the productive skills of language (for their performance in English). Accordingly, having completed the preparatory class, these students have the ability to produce language on most parts, but there still remain some areas of speaking (e.g. like making speeches before an audience, producing longer stretches of spoken discourse and reflecting on the interlocutors’ opinions) for these students to develop further so that they can be fully competent communicators in English. Hence, the Further Speaking Skills course to be developed for this study will answer to this main need. It is also believed that this course will add to students’ proficiency with other language skills in spite of its preliminary specific focus on speaking skills for it is impossible to isolate the skills of a language as supported by today’s latest and current language teaching methodology.

2. Review of Literature

2.1 Conceptual Background: Theoretical Influence on the Basis of Language Curriculum

According to Yalden (1987), course design is a procedure to merge already present knowledge concerning language teaching and learning with the new opinions, wishes and outlook into the world brought by language students to the language class. In this regard, language course designers are to have a certain degree of theoratical knowledge and awareness concerning language teaching and learning proposed in the available literature on second language learning and acquisition.

Any change seen in theory has automatically influenced the practice about second or foreign language teaching. For instance, a particular interest on structural linguistics in the past has resulted in the formulation of structure-based courses and lessons (Dubin & Olshtain, 1986). However, with the particular surge of interest concerning socio-cultural views about the nature of language, sociolinguistic issues and communication have started to gain more and more attention over the years. Hence, it was seen that linguistic theory was introduced with a new sociolinguistic component or perspective (Yalden, 1987). The courses based upon structures (i.e. knowledge about the language) have lost their popularity over the courses based upon or including socio-linguistic knowledge in terms of classroom practice. Such changes also influenced the way we define language proficiency. The understanding of language proficieny as the extend of mastery of the lexical, grammatical or phonological structures of language seen in the traditional language teaching approaches left its place to such an understanding of language profiency realized basically as the ability to communicate. That is, it was realized that languages are needed for communication and thus should be learned for communication and this condition requires more than the structural knowledge regarding the language.

Based on the changes in theory mentioned above, it can be concluded that the communication with others should form the main basis of a speaking course to be designed for today’s language teaching purposes. Thus, it would be wise to refer to some theoretical issues regarding communicative purposes of language learning. As is also put forth by Yalden (1987), it should be remembered that changes in theoretical issues will in turn bring about some implications for practice and for course design practices, and these changes should be followed and theoratical information should be updated prior to any course design project.

2.1.1 Acquisition-learning distinction

In his theory of second language acquisition, which has been greatly influential upon second language research and teaching for two decades now, Krashen (1981, 1982) talks about the Acquisition-Learning Hypothesis which proposes that there are two distinct and independent ways of second language competence or performance in adults. “The acquired system” and “the learned system” are further defined as these two independent systems of second language performance. The acquired system, or acquisition, is similar to the process children pass through in acquiring their first language. This process is termed as a subconscious process in that acquirers have no conscious awareness of the rules or of the fact that they are learning a language, but they may have a feel for grammaticality (correctness) and they are aware that they are using the language for communication. Meaningful interaction is very important in such a process in which the focus will be on the communicative act and thus on meaning, not on the form. Another perspective to develop competence in a second language is through conscious way of language learning which stands for knowing about a language, that is, its grammar and rules.

Given the links of this hypothesis with the teaching of speaking, Richards (1990) points out that the leaming-acquisition distinction that may underpin one’s choice of a teaching approach, that is, whether one will teach speaking directly (stands for learning) or indirectly (stands for acquisition). The direct approach involves the teaching of specific microskills, strategies and processes of fluent conversation (Richards, 1990). While practicing conversation and speaking is considered important in this approach, there is this presupposition that form-focused instruction might be needed at some point during the lesson (Slade & Thurnbury, 2006). The indirect approach, however, claims that learners gain speaking competence simply through doing it. In other words, conversational competence is arrived at as a result of taking part in a conversational interaction (Richards, 1990). As is also put forth by Bums (1998, p. 103), there is a focus on “tasks mediated through language, negotiation and sharing of information” in the development of conversational competence. This reference to the role of tasks equates indirect approach with the task-based learning which is in fact based on the communicative approach with its claim that language is acquired by means of communication.

Although explicit instruction might be helpful in learning certain formulaic routines and conversational move types (e.g. ways of opening and closing conversations, turn-taking and back-channeling), there is a scarcity of evidence in favor of the direct teaching of conversation (Slade & Thurnbury, 2006). Moreover, some characteristics of conversation are universal in that they might be transferred from learners’ first languages (Brown & Yule, 1983; McCarthy, 1991).

Slade and Thurnbury (2006) have concluded that there is a case for both an indirect and direct approach in the acquisition of conversational competence. Slade and Thurnbury (2006) argue for what they call as indirect approach plus. In this regard, indirect approach to teaching of speaking would entail exposure to conversational input (preferably authentic ones) through which the learners would be able to extract the conversational moves, lexical chunks and formulaic expressions in an unconscious manner, which corresponds to the idea of acquired way of competence. However, there will be instances where teacher presentation of some explicit features and rules would be needed, such as having students identify discourse markers and hesitation devices.

2.1.2 Comprehensible input

The input hypothesis of Krashen’s (1981) second language acquisition theory is based on the question of how people acquire languages, and it holds for the acquisition in the acquisition-learning distinction pole. In his theoretical restatement of the acquisition-learning distinction hypothesis, he inquires how people move from i (current level of proficiency) to i+1 (expected level of proficiency). The main claim of the hypothesis is that in order to move from i to i+1, the acquirer is to understand the input that contains i+1, which is called as the comprehensible input. The understanding process here requires an emphasis on the meaning of the message not on the form of that. To put it differently, people acquire a second language only when the message given is a little beyond their current level of proficiencies. While doing this, people opt to use the available contextual information, their extra-linguistic knowledge and their general knowledge of the world in addition to their linguistic (grammatical) competence (Krashen, 1981, 1982).

Given the further claims of this hypothesis, one implication relates to the fact that speaking fluency is not possible to be taught directly, but this productive ability develops over time. Provision of the comprehensible input is thus the best way to teach speaking (Krashen, 1981). In this regard, people will speak when they are ready to speak and their early speech will not be grammatically accurate. Accuracy will also develop over time as the learners are provided with more comprehensible input. Equating the child’s caretaker speech with a comprehensible input source, Krashen (1981) puts forth that input from the caretaker tend to get more complicated as the child gets more mature. Some other researchers also claimed correlations between child’s linguistic maturity (proficiency) and input complexity (Cross, 1977; Newport & Gleitman, 1977, as cited in Krashen, 1981).

Krashen (1981) mentions intake (basically the input to be provided to the students) and the necessary characteristics to be qualified as intake, such as meaningfulness, naturality, being communicative and interesting. He believes that it is the natural and communicative input that will provide some i + 1 or other for everyone.

In connecting Krashen’s (1981, 1982) ideas to our case of developing a further speaking skills course, it would be wise to first consider the provision of comprehensible input that is beyond students’ current level of proficiency so that the students will later and better generate the output, which simply means that they will speak. It would be unwise to expect accuracy in speaking at the very beginning levels of language proficiency, as students should be allowed for some time for their accuracy to develop. Though the students of this further speaking course will not be allowed for a silent period as the hypothesis claims regarding the early speech development of the children (or second language learners here), students will already possess a particular degree of syntactic competence to express their ideas and opinions because of the course. However, engagement with the materials (receptive skill materials) to be provided as inputs might be thought as such a period for they allocate some time for students to produce speaking and meanwhile they will feel better and more ready for the output, that is, speaking. For the input complexity, it seems logical to provide the learners with more complicated inputs as these students are considered to have made a certain progress towards their English proficiency. Furthermore, given this issue, Krashen (1981) already mentioned a correlation or a compliance between input complexity and learners’ proficiency. His suggested criterion for the intake reminds us of the use of authentic materials which are thought to be beyond the level of the students. Krashen (1981) has also mentioned that the intake should be natural to the learners, which in turn may imply that natural and real-like materials should be preferred for the students.

2.1.3 Affective filter

Krashen (1981) claims that even though you provide an input that meets the criteria for the potential good intake, it cannot reach to the language acquisition device in our brain because of some other lacks, such as lack of motivation or positive attitude towards a task. In other words, there is a high affective wall that filters out the input. In this sense, motivational and attitudinal constraints should be satisfied for the linguistic and learning conditions to take place. When the affective filter is high, the acquisition on the part of the learners will be at a very poor level or none even if you provide a good quality, meaningful, communicative and natural input. This claim is termed as affective filter hypothesis, and the implication of this hypothesis for the speaking class to be designed would refer to our creating a relaxing, motivating and enjoyable atmosphere for the learners so that they can make it to the processing of comprehensible input.

2.1.4 Competence and performance in language

Chomsky (1965) differentiated between linguistic competence and linguistic performance. He defined linguistic theory as mentalistic or related to the discovery of mental reality underlying actual behavior. His view showed a drastic opposition to the behaviorist theories of linguistics, which study physical verbal behavior that can be directly seen. Chomsky (1965) characterized linguistic competence as what a speaker knows and thus what a linguist is required to work on. As for the linguistic performance, it has been defined as “what a speaker does (says or writes) ” (Yalden, 1987, p.15), and he suggested that this should not be a concern for the linguist. Hymes (1972), opposing the view of Chomsky (1965), pointed out that Chomsky’s category of competence (linguistic) is not related to language use in any way. Moreover, he also asserted that Chomsky’s category of performance only deals with the psychological constraints on performance and excludes the concept of social interaction and appropriateness of “what we say or write” (p. 16)...