Key points of

syllabus design
module
Master two
Biskra
University

Summarized and Organized by:

Syllabus design Ms. Nawal Boudiaf & Ms. Fatiha
Mounib
Syllabus design
 Syllabus: “Sub-part of curriculum”, is a statement of the general content to be learnt
by students during the planned course.
 Curriculum: a broader concept which encompasses the whole complex philosophical,
social and administrative factors that help in planning an educational program.

Differences

Syllabus: contains subjects and topics covered in the course of study (its focus is on one
subject).

Syllabi:

 It is a Greek term
 It deals with subjects
 It is descriptive in nature
 It is narrow
 It is dedicated for fixed term
 It is displayed by an Exam board

Curriculum: indicates the chapters and academic content taught in school (knowledge, skills
and competencies).

 It is a Latin term
 It deals with the course
 It is perspective in nature
 It is broad
 it remains until the course lasts
 it is set out by the government or administration

Syllabus design definition

“The selection and the grading of the content considering what to teach and in what order”.

Common Components in a syllabus:

It provides students with a description of the course. It includes topics, assignments,

assessments, policies and expectations.
A. Course description
 Course content = the content
 Learning objectives = what students should do at the end
 Characteristics of class meetings = types of activities
 Logistics = names of instructors, course material and where and when to meet
B. Course topics and assignments
 Schedule of topics and readings
 Assignments, projects, exams (demonstrate students learning)
C. Course policies and values
 Inclusiveness: inclusive atmosphere that welcomes all students
 Integrity: types of work given to students (basically originality and objective)
 Responsibility: acquainting students with the teacher’s responsibilities
 Expectation of success: students’ learning should be successful in teachers’ course

Course design
N.B. An effective course design appears within the understanding of:

Who are the students? (i.e. level, motivation, background, problems encountered with
the material).

What do I want students to be able to do? (set your objectives).

How will I measure students’ abilities? (i.e. careful selection of assignments and
assessments that lead to the learning objectives).

Course designers

They are the integral part of learning and teaching process and they are the efficient
decision makers.

Who are they?

Teachers, scientists, evaluators, artists, critical thinkers.

They should have:

 Sufficient knowledge on linguistics and learning theories.

 Solid conceptual understanding to avoid inaccurate elaboration.
  Honest personality towards their duties.
 Appropriate time, energy and financial resources to add feasibility, credibility and
originality to their work.
 Consult experience designers.
 Consider the authenticity of materials.
 Take into account the cultural aspect in language learning.

Syllabus design criteria

N.B. the following criteria are content based.

1. Learnability: it is important to save learner’s motivation and keep a positive attitude

towards the course.
2. Frequency: take into account certain language items appear frequently and needed. Even
those that are less used must not be ignored.
3. Coverage: some items need to appear frequently and used.
4. Usefulness: evolve the usefulness of the content and widen the scope of linguistic abilities
for language learners.

The Course rational

It is the nature and the reason for designing this course.

The rationale answers the following questions:

 Who is this course for?

 What is the course about?
 What kind of teaching and learning will take place in the course?

Purpose of developing rationale

 Goals of the course

 Exemplifications of the type of teaching and learning process
 Learners and teachers role in the course besides reflection of course’s beliefs and
principles.

Instructor information: the teacher should add his contact information (name, e-mail, blog,
website etc…) to facilitate for learners to contact him/her.
Course policies means that the rules on which the teacher and the learner agree upon to keep
a successful teaching and learning process.

 Attendance and submission policies: example, how do you handle late submission.
 Assignments: example, kind of assignments that help students to master the date of
course, make the material their own and practise key skills.
 Evaluation: example, students’ evaluation, assignment count, participation (criteria of
a good participation) etc…

P.S. the teacher should state his/her intention clearly to avoid disruption or discomfort
during the session.

Needs Analysis (realised by Ms. Fatiha Mounib)

It is a significant step in designing the course or preparing the materials, because it affects
the course outcomes.

 Nunan (1988) defines NA as a family of procedures for gathering information about

learners and about communication tasks.
 Brown (1995) defines NA as a systematic collection and analysis of all subjective and
objective information necessary to define and validate defensible curriculum processes that
satisfy the language learning requirements of students within the context of particular
institutions that influence the learning and teaching situation.

The purpose of needs analysis: Richards (2001)

 To find what language skills learners need to perform a particular role

 To determine whether the course adequately addresses students’ needs
 To determine which students need a training in particular language skill
 To determine the gap between students’ needs and abilities
 To collect information about students’ problems

Different needs analysis

Objective: Teachers’ perceptions on learners’ needs (perceived) process

oriented necessities.

Subjective: what students want and feel that they need (felt) product oriented
lucks and wants.
Needs analysis process

Brown (1995) Model

1. Making Basic decisions

Who will be involved?
Types of information should be gathered.
Viewpoints should be taken.
2. Who will be involved?
Target group whom the information is about.
Resource group (group of information).
Audience (people to act upon the analysis needs analyst.
3. Kind of information gathered
Discrepancy (discrepancies between the desired performance and actual performance)
Diagnostic (weaknesses and lucks in specific contexts and situations)
Democratic (changes desired by the majority)
Analytic (what students need to develop)
4. Which viewpoints should be taken
Situation Needs VS language needs
Linguistic content VS learning process
Objective VS subjective
5. Information Gathering
Types of questions
Types of instruments
Selecting procedures
6. Tapes of Questions
Problems
Attitudes
Priority
Abilities
Solutions
 Gathering information (sources of information)

Learners /People working/studying in the field / Ex-Students / Documents in the field

Stakeholders (clients, employers) / ESP research.

Instruments and procedures

Questionnaire/ Discourse Analysis /Discussion/ Structured Interview/ Observations

Assessments/ Tests / Meetings

Planning for syllabus design

Syllabus objectives

1. Goal (broad notion) = it is obtainable and observable which provides a sign for
course development.
2. Goal Purpose and characteristics
 General statements of program’s purposes.
 Students’ ability to do at the end of the program.
 Evolving precise & observable objectives.
3. Instructional Objective (specific notion) = it provides particular knowledge,
behaviours and skills that the learners should do at the end of the course.
4. Components of instructional objective = they help the instructor to clarify and
design comprehensible objectives.
 Components are performance, condition and criterion.

Elements provided by Brown are the following:

 Subject (who?)
 Performance (what?)
 Condition (where?, how much time?)
 Measure (how)
 criterion (how well)

Key points in objective

 Variability in specificity
 Flexibility
 Consensus-based in nature
  Program specificity
 Teacher-friendliness

Criticising objectives (Brown)

 Association with behavioural psychology

 Issue with quantify ability
 No originality
 Limitation in teacher’s freedom
 Inadequacy for expression of language learning

Advantages

 Alter the needs into teaching points

 Clarify and organise those teaching points
 Evaluate students’ progress
 Limit what students do
 Adopt, adapt and develop teaching materials

P.S. There are numerous advantages but we have selected the most important and the
clearest ones.

Process and product objectives

a) Process (pedagogic): it describes the task that learners may conduct inside the
classroom.
b) Product (real world): it describes the task that learners may conduct outside the
classroom.

N.B. Product = students’ actions are as an outcome of the instructions

Process = activities to evolve the skills needed to conduct the product objectives

Alternatives to Objectives are competencies and standards.

Competencies = more general goals that objectives (overall objectives for the course)
Standards = a written description of what a student should know and able to demonstrate
at a specific point in his/her education.
 Content selection and organisation

General course information: is the main basics of a syllabus.

The main elements of general course information

 Table of content
 Course calendar
 Evaluation
 Resources
 Content information
 Learning tools
 Purpose, description and objective of a course

Course planning

The designer must provide levels of the process and organise the stages to reach the course
objective.

1) Entry and Exit level: language levels that the course begins at and ends with.
Entry is based on needs analysis.
Exit is the proficiency level that students reach at the end.

N.B. For Entry level: information that is more accurate provided by an international
proficiency test such as TOEFL & IELTS.

Course content selection

The designer must link between the needs and the objectives.

P.S. Relying on the learner’s needs

Besides, they can refer to:

 Available literature on the topic

 Students’ problem
 Specialists
 Experts
In addition to: subject matter knowledge, learners’ proficiency level, current views on
second language teaching (SLT) & learning and conventional wisdom & convenience
(According to Richards).

N.B. Objectives must be refined, revised and fine-tuned in the process of content
selection and design.

Scope and sequence

It refers to the distribution of content in the course.

a) Scope: elucidates the breadth and depth of the items covered in a course.
b) Sequence: what content is needed to be learnt later?

Criteria of sequencing:

 From simple to complex (from less difficult to more complex)

 Chronology (chronological order of the event ex: writing process)
 Need ( what students need outside the classroom)
 Perquisite learning (select what is necessary at a certain point as a standard in the
next procedure of learning)
 Whole to part/ part to whole (whole topic that deal with a specific point /or/ a
specific point that leads to the whole)
 Spiral sequencing (“This approach involves the recycling of items to ensure that
learners have repeated opportunities to learn them» Richards.

Learning resources
Any tool helps teachers to teach and learners to learn.

Learners must know the use of teaching materials and consider anything related to pedagogy
to serve the educational purposes and course objectives.

Example: textbooks, flashcards, software, magazine, podcasts, activity books etc…

Teachers should be selective in term of materials and resources that fit learners’ needs.

Course calendar

Teacher should take into account all regional, national, international and religious holidays
to guarantee a correct development of the course during the academic year.
  Last/ first day of class
 General assignments
 Deadlines of submissions
 Collective exams
 Group & individual tests
 Time/ content distribution of teaching units

Grading & Evaluation

N.B. It is important to set a clear grading method stating explicitly the assessment process and
measurement styles used.

Types of evaluation

1. Formative evaluation deals with continuum progress of the program “by checking
what is going well and what is not, and what problems need to be addressed” Richards.
2. Illuminative evaluation (to illuminate) means to understand the teaching and learning
context without planning to change or edit any part.
3. Summative evaluation takes place at the end of the program and it deals with worth,
value, acceptability, efficiency and effectiveness of the program.

Criteria for effectiveness

 Mastery of objectives (achieving the objectives)

 Performance on tests (measuring course effectiveness)
 Measure of acceptability (besides to objectives such as good students’ performance)
 Retention rate or reenrolment (a course can be a good sign for institutions to rate it as
successful and efficient)
 Efficiency of the course (to what extent the course is efficient, developed and
implemented)

Types of syllabus

Types of syllabus design

1. Product oriented: the knowledge acquired by learners at the end of the instructional
session or period.
 Structural/ Grammatical syllabus: introduces the grammatical aspects of language that
will be taught.
 Notional/ Functional syllabus: considers language functions to be performed (speech
act) besides notions.
 Situational: teaching the language in a particular situation.
 Lexical
2. Process oriented deals with learning experience and focuses on the specification of tasks
and activities that students take during the course.
 Skill-based: a collection of abilities needed to perform the language by learners to reach
the level of competency.
 Content-based: providing students with data they need using the target language.
 Task-based: focuses on specific tasks that are complex & purposeful and learners need.

P.S. product oriented focuses on the form & process oriented focuses on the meaing.

Criticism

Grammatical syllabus
 Focuses on form and neglect communicative skills.
 Presents partial dimension of proficiency.
 Focuses on sentence than longer units of discourse.

Functional syllabus

 No clear criteria to select or grade function.

 Presents a simple view of communicative competence.
 Leads to grammatical competence gap since some important grammatical structures are
not taught.

Situational syllabus

 Gaps in students’ grammatical knowledge.

 Leads to phrase-book approach.
 Little is known about the language used in different situations.
 Language used in specific situations may not transfer to other situations.

Skill-based syllabus

 No basis to determine skills.

 Focuses on discrete aspects of performance rather than developing integrated
communicative abilities.

Task-based syllabus

 Problems encountered (teachers, setting and students).

 Resources beyond textbook.
 Students may reject this type of instruction.
 Evaluation can be difficult.

Content-based syllabus

The main criticism for this type of syllabi is that the teacher may not be qualified
enough (Richards & Rodgers, 2001, p: 220). What makes it difficult to criticise this type
is that it focuses more on the specialised content rather than the language (English) itself.

Choice and integration of syllabi

a) Programme factors
 Goals & objectives: the goals and objectives of the instructional programme go hand
in hand, and are closely matched to your choice of the types of syllabi to be
integrated
 Instructional resources: There are two types of resources, the ones used inside of the
classroom such as textbooks, films, slides, pictures, and the once implemented in
the teaching experience from out of the classroom like television programs, films,
and field trips. The textbook can be either sole of instructional resources or basis
that affect the choice of syllabi.
 Accountability and measurement: making the instruction accountable and measured by
external measures usually tests.
b) Students factors
 Goals of students: programme goals and students’ goals should match, but it is not always
the case. As a solution, it is better to increase the general functional, situational and skill-
content to meet both goals.
 The experience, expectation and knowledge: these items also can affect the choice of
syllabi. Krahnke thinks that adults often have ideas of what and how the instructional
process of language should be like.
c) Knowledge and beliefs: knowledge, educational background and teachers’ experience can
affect the choice of syllabi.
d) Research and theory: research, perspectives and theories can affect the choice of syllabi.
e) Common parties
f) Trends: teachers must be careful in following a trend since it affect teaching methods,
materials, tools and topics.

Best of luck