Syllabus Desain and Instructional Materials

SECTION 4
SYLLABUS DESIGN AND INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS

CHAPTER 7-8

( The Elt Curriculum: A Flexible Model For A Changing World –  The Role Of Materials In The Language Classroom: Finding The Balance)

In this section, there are two articles that discuss about syllabus design and instructional materials. In this section we will know how to design a good syllabus and how to good instructional materials. They are the ELT curriculum: a flexible model for a changing world and the role of materials in the language classroom: finding the balance. Two kinds of articles have to understand by the teacher in order the teacher know how to design a good syllabus, as we know that syllabus is an important thing in teaching learning process. Also the paper in this sections focus on issues relating to syllabus design and materials development. As I know that the teacher’s responsible is not only for teaching language for communication and language as knowledge, but also for encouraging learners to take responsibility for their own learning so that they develop skills and strategies for continuing to learn outside of the classroom. So the teacher must be understand and can to make or design a good syllabus.

The term curriculum is open to a variety of definition in its narrowest sense it is synonymous with the term syllabus. And the wider sense it refer to all aspects of the planning, implementation and evaluation of an educational program, the why, how, and how well together with the what of the teaching-learning process. The central focus of the curriculum in this model is the content of what is to be learned by, or transmitted to, the learner. In the classical humanist tradition, the content is a valued cultural heritage, the understanding of which contribute to the overall intellectual development of the learners; and from the point of view of epistemological objectivism, the content is knowledge which has been identified and agreed to be universal, unchanging and absolute.

To design a syllabus, an alternative or addition to performance objective is the formulation of process-related objectives, for example from an English for academic purpose (EAP) course, the student will be able to select and apply reading strategies appropriate to his or her needs another form is instructional objectives, which are more related to methodology (e.g., to develop the learner’s confidence in speaking) the debate will and should continue for both the teacher and the learner objectives provide a guide and framework for what goes on in the classroom. The main point to be made in the context of an integrated approach to curriculum development is that teacher training and development is a necessary and ongoing process, involving the exploration of a range of materials, methods and approaches to learner training and evaluation. Teachers must be reflective, analytic and creative, open to new methods and ideas the aim of teacher-training course must be to develop teachers who are researchers not just technician and deliverers of the syllabus. In this way methodology can reflect curriculum goal, and teacher’s experience in turn contribute to the process of curriculum renewal. Effective teaching material are likely to reflect the following statements, they are language is functional and must be contextualized, language development requires learner engagement in purposeful use of language, the language used should be realistic and authentic, classroom material will usually seek to include an audio visual component and etc. the material must contextualize the language they present, without a knowledge of what is going on who the participants are impossible to understand the real meaning of an interaction. So the focus of input and output materials should thus be on whole texts, language in use rather than on so called building blocks to be used at some later date. And then the material need to be authentic, in the sense that the language is not artificially constrained, and it’s the same time, amenable to exploitation for language teaching purpose (MacWilliam, 1990, p.160). next material need to be flexible enough to cater to individual and contextual differences. Although language is a social practice learning a language is largely an individual process as learners seek to integrate newly perceived information into their exiting language system. It is essential for teachers to recognize the different background, experience and learning styles that students bring to the language classroom. And the impact these experience have on what aspect of the input are likely to become intake, in other words, it is to a large extent the learners, not the teacher, who control what is learnt since it is they who selectively organize the sensory input into meaningful wholes.