Observations on programme design papers

This paper reflects upon the creation and maintenance of adequate service English provision in tertiary institutions where English is wholly or in part the medium of instruction and study. It thus discusses the classic English for Academic Purposes operation that has variously arisen in many parts of the world following the precipitate advance of English as the world's leading language of research, scholarship and advanced training, and following the changing patterns of non-native speaker enrolment in English-medium universities. However, if the subject matter of this paper is clear, an appropriate treatment of that subject matter remains somewhat obscure. As the ethnomethodologists would put it, there is some doubt as to what ‘counts as’ a paper on programme design. Even more difficult is the question of how we are to judge the value or usefulness of such a paper. Should we be after sense, sensibility or schematics? Should we be searching for Yeats's ‘paradigm that plays upon the spume of things’ or expecting reports from the ‘Hard Knocks’ school of life? Or somehow both?

One important reason why such questions are perplexing is that they expose to us the divided nature of the ESL world. The answers will very likely differ according to whether the respondents see themselves as working within an American or British ESL tradition. For instance, if we take TESOL Quarterly as the flagship of U.S. ESL thinking, then we will find therein a concentration of papers dealing with second language acquisition, classroom-centred research, the validation of tests and so on.

In this paper we want to set out a number of perspectives on materials design which focus on learning outcomes other than those relating to the acquisition of the second/foreign language. The idea of looking beyond the immediate, stated objectives of educational materials is not a new one. Dewey, for example, remarked in 1938:

More recently, however, Jackson (1968) has introduced the idea of a ‘hidden curriculum’ within teaching, referring to learning outcomes apart from those intended in the ‘manifest curriculum’. Similar ideas have been expressed by a number of other writers, who see a ‘sub-surface’ (and frequently pernicious) element to teaching or teaching materials. Freire (1972), for example, is in no doubt as to the ‘philosophy of man’ projected by conventional approaches to adult literacy:

Introduction

This paper is concerned with a central issue in language teaching and learning: the efficacy of workplans which are designed to enable the development of an individual's knowledge and capabilities in a new language. Its purpose is to examine both the criteria and the means for the evaluation of language learning tasks. In the paper, I wish to offer particular answers to two major questions. First, what decisions have to be made in evaluating learning tasks and what problems do we have to take account of in the decisions we make? The first part of the paper therefore considers alternatives in the timing, focus, and criteria of task evaluation and the problems which confront us within each of these matters. The second relates to how we might undertake evaluation: what practical procedure might best cope with the problems inherent in the evaluation of learning tasks while also being the most valid means for evaluation currently available to us. My priority throughout the paper is to try to deduce practical proposals, therefore – in addressing this latter question – the second half of the paper suggests ways of implementing a task evaluation cycle.

A language learning task can be regarded as a springboard for learning work. In a broad sense, it is a structured plan for the provision of opportunities for the refinement of knowledge and capabilities entailed in a new language and its use during communication.

Introduction

It is hardly controversial to note that teaching materials are one of the major determinants of what gets taught in language teaching programmes. Indeed, it has been suggested (Hawkes, 1983: 99) that recent communicative programmes assume an even greater role for materials than has traditionally been given to them. It is therefore of considerable importance that appropriate techniques of materials evaluation are developed. Although almost everyone connected with a teaching learning enterprise will have some interest in examining the materials, they will not all be asking the same questions. There is thus no single all-purpose approach to evaluation. If evaluation is not to be time wasting and possibly self-defeating, the evaluator must not only ask relevant questions, but have access to an adequate amount of the sort of information that can help to answer them. As a brief illustration, a teacher planning a course is likely to want to know whether Book X suits the needs and interests of the students concerned. An inspector, on the other hand, might be more interested in the extent to which a course matches an official syllabus and in the ultimate level of language proficiency which learners demonstrate, irrespective of details of how this came about. Both of these viewpoints have generated a number of appropriate evaluation techniques (Low, 1987).

The present paper focuses on the position of the materials designer, who is in a rather different position from the teacher or inspector, being concerned to know how materials appropriate to a range of teaching learning situations might be designed in the first place, and secondly, how small details could best be modified in the light of people's experiences with them.

Introduction

In this introductory paper, I have three major aims: first to provide a framework for discussing the language curriculum; second to define the notion of a ‘coherent’ language curriculum, the theme of this book as well as the title of this paper; and third to show how the other papers in this volume and the particular aspects of development they focus upon relate to the curriculum process as a whole.

The word ‘curriculum’ is defined here in its broadest sense, to include all the relevant decision making processes of all the participants. The products of these decision making processes generally exist in some concrete form and can be observed and described: for example policy documents, syllabuses, teacher-training programmes, teaching materials and resources, and teaching and learning acts. The processes themselves are usually more difficult to identify and analyse. They involve such questions as: Who is supposed to make the decisions and who actually does? How are these people selected and what qualifications do they have? What are their terms of reference? What resources in time, money, information and expertise are available to them? etc. Other ‘process’ factors such as prejudice, preconception, ambition or laziness are even harder to examine, but may be no less influential in their effects.

The framework consists of three sets of constraints on curriculum decision making. The first is policy. A curriculum which appears in all other respects to be successful, but which fails to achieve its aims, is hard to justify however much the participants may have benefited from their experience in other ways, for example socially or financially.

While program evaluation may be conducted on a number of levels including administration, teaching and curriculum, this paper focuses more narrowly on the measurement of student performance as the key in evaluation. It addresses the evaluation issue of student mastery or non-mastery of language program objectives. In doing so, it attempts to view in context issues pertaining to i) the nature of evidence to be used for such student evaluation, ii) the need for evaluation to be accountable to program goals, and iii) the appropriate measurement approach to be taken in mastery evaluation. Mastery decision measurement here refers to the attempt to determine whether an examinee has mastered the content he or she has been taught, or has reached a level of competence defined as mastery. It is by no means a new concept. In fact, a normal part of a teacher's job is making decisions concerning student advancement based on performance. The present discussion will focus on the bases for such decisions and the uses of those decisions in program evaluation.

Throughout the discussions which follow, the context of evaluation should always be kept in mind because evaluation always has consequences. Generally, people do not like to be judged, and they tend not to like their products to be judged. While evaluations may be objective, they are never neutral. Further, evaluations will always have audiences, and the original audience seldom remains the sole audience. Peer evaluations made for a teacher trainer have a way of coming to the attention of the program director.

Introduction

In this paper, it is suggested that the effectiveness of any language programme will be dictated as much by the attitudes and expectations of the learners as by the specifications of the official curriculum. The assumption that there is a one-to-one relationship between teaching and learning is questioned, and it is hypothesised that learners have their own agendas in the language lessons they attend. These agendas, as much as the teacher's objectives, determine what learners take from any given lesson or teaching/learning encounter.

In order to explore the ‘hidden agenda’ hypothesis, studies into learner perceptions of learning processes are reviewed and compared with teacher perceptions. These studies provide a basis for the interpretation of classroom interactions which reveal the ‘hidden agendas’ of the learners in action.

The final section of the paper discusses some of the practical implications of the hidden agenda hypothesis, and suggests some practical techniques for achieving a synthesis between the official and the hidden curriculum.

The scope of the language curriculum

Recently there has been a call for a more systematic approach to language curriculum development. Thus, Richards (1984b) suggests that, in contrast with general educational practice where curriculum development is a ‘major educational industry’:

The aim of this collection is to present ‘state of the art’ papers in language curriculum studies by writers who have been actively involved in shaping theory in this field and who, between them, have applied that theory in almost every part of the world and in a variety of contexts.

The idea of a ‘coherent language curriculum’ summarises the range of the papers included and the theme which unites them. ‘Curriculum’ is used in the British sense to include all the factors which contribute to the teaching and learning situation, while the term ‘coherence’ emphasises the interdependence of these factors and the need for mutually consistent and complementary decision making throughout the processes of development and evaluation.

To set this publication within the context of developments in language curriculum studies over the past twenty-five to thirty years, I would like to propose that applied linguistics, the theoretical arm of language teaching, has passed through two major phases in its brief history, and is now entering a third. The first phase was that of the communicative revolution when it was inspired by new ideas and iconoclastic zeal. Its main achievement was to demonstrate the inadequacies in theory and practice of the ‘ancien régime but much that was valuable fell into disrepute or neglect through a form of guilt by association. The first revolutionary phase came to an end with applied linguistics focused upon the new linguistic sciences, psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics, divorced from its structuralist/behaviourist past, and distanced, if not estranged from the mainstream of educational theory.

Introduction

In the development of research on language teaching there has for some years been a tendency to examine more closely ‘what goes on in the classroom’ and to study classroom discourse (turn taking, error correction, and the like; see, for example, Larsen-Freeman, 1980). This interest in the classroom has a very positive side and must therefore be welcomed, because it is close to the reality of language teaching practice. But there is also a negative side which classroom researchers soon recognise: an over-concern with minutiae of teaching and learning, the collection of infinite and unmanageable details, quickly leads to the inability to see the wood for the trees. The contention of this paper is that in order to make sense of classroom discourse and classroom observations they must be placed into a broader context which one might call language teaching analysis. In my remarks I would like to outline the main features of such an analysis.

Before doing so we should consider briefly, by way of introduction, why there has been this tendency to become bogged down in the details of classroom observations and classroom discourse. The interest in the classroom as an empirical database has resulted from developments in pedagogy and linguistics.

In pedagogy the disappointment with research on global ‘methods’, such as comparisons between audiolingualism and cognitivism, had led to a shift of interest from research on teaching to research on learning.

Introduction

In this brief paper, I want to examine evidence which suggests that program innovation has not worked very well as a strategy for educational renewal. I contend that good programs are central to good education and that failures in program innovation are not as often failures of content as failures of contextual planning.

I want to draw distinctions between three types or levels of educational program planning. I label these levels

1. Syllabus design

2. Curriculum development

3. Polity determination

I propose that in the same sense that curriculum development is a contextually enlarged view of syllabus design so polity determination is a contextually enlarged view of curriculum development. I propose that examination of and planning within the relevant political context is critical to the success of any educational program and that program failures are often attributable to shortcomings in the sort of planning I call polity determination.

Finally, I propose a polity planning framework, which though necessarily limited in scope, has helped planners of three language education programs to become more aware of and be able to accommodate for those factors of a polito-pedagogical nature which often decide the success or failure of educational programs.

Success and failure

‘Innovations or revisions in programs have had only about 20 percent success rate in education.’ This conclusion from a large-scale study of educational change efforts has been supported by analyses from a wide variety of studies (Parish and Arrends, 1983).