TASK-BASED SYLLABUS DESIGN: SELECTING, GRADING AND SEQUENCING TASKS

Wilson Burgos ArocaMaster’s Degree on English Language Teaching

SYLLABUS DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY

Syllabus Design Syllabus methodology

Selection, justification and sequencing of linguistic and experiential

content

Selection, justification and sequencing of

learning tasks and activities

How to achieve a rational articulation in selecting, sequencing and integrating tasks so that the curriculum is more than an untidy 'rag-bag'

of tasks ?

SCOPE AND CHANGING NATURE OF SYLLABUS DESIGN

• Traditional view: syllabus design in a restricted light.

• Communicative language learning and teaching has forced a radical rethinking of key curriculum questions:

what?, why? and when? methodology (how?), and assessment (how well?).

TRADITIONAL AND COMMUNICATIVE CURRICULUM MODELS COMPAREDQuestion for discussion: Why must we follow a communicative approach

to curriculum design?

COMMUNICATIVE TASKS

What do you think are the teacher’s roles in communicative tasks? What are the learners’ ones?

IMPORTANT CONSIDERATIONS ON COMMUNICATIVE TASKS

• Communicative needs.• Authentic material.• Content familiarity.• information organization; familiarity of topic; explicitness and

sufficiency of information; referring expressions.• Two-way tasks and one-way tasks.• Length of speaking.• Variation on learners’ task preferences.• Required information exchange tasks and optional information

exchange tasks.• Convergent and divergent tasks.• Teacher’s VS students’ task preferences.

SELECTING TASKS

Tasks should:

- Be systematically linked to the things learners need to do in the real world

- Incorporate what we know about the nature of successful communication

- Embody what we know about second language acquisition.

A ROUTINE MODEL OF TASKS

Task selection and sequence based on learners’ communicative needs

Task grading according to macro functions or gender and negotiation of meaning

CONCLUSIONS• We must adopt a more communicative view of curriculum,

where knowledge is not mostly pre-stablished.• Tasks must be selected and sequenced according to the

learners’ communicative needs, those which they need to do outside the classroom.

• Communicative tasks must graded according to the management of interaction, the negotiation of meaning and the macro functions.

• Research has put a lot of emphasis on psycholinguistic tasks but not on the importance of ‘real world’ ones.

• More than pedagogic, we must select “real world” tasks, where learners approximate the sort of tasks required of them in the world beyond the classroom.

• A method based on task routines can be used to select, sequence and grade communicative tasks.

THANK YOU