Curriculum Design in Saudi Arabia - Assignment Example

Curriculum design Institution: Name: Curriculum design Introduction The course will target ESL students in Saudi Arabia, aiming to further their education in English related courses. The course will run for10 weeks (40 teaching hours), enhancing English development for intermediate level ESL students. The course is developed to assist ESL learners to practice essential grammar skills as well as language structures critical in the development of background information, formal definitions, summarizing of major concepts and presentation (Ur, 1996). Aims and objectives The main goal of this proposed course is to provide trainees with a solid foundation of basic sentence form and function, while concentrating on grammatical structures, vocabulary and relevant terms applicable in technical and professional contexts. In addition, the course will enhance the ability of the students to communicate effectively and efficiently through improved knowledge in writing, reading, summarizing and presentation skills. In addition, the course will encourage students to improve and integrate their English knowledge in understanding technical communication in other English related courses. In order to achieve two goals the students will need to maintain certain expectations to meet the aims and objectives of the course, including: Communicate effectively by using work and major-related technical terms and vocabulary. Understanding simple dialogues, instructions and descriptions regarding simple technical topics, objects and examples. Using basic sentence structure , appropriate vocabulary, correct spelling to write short report on describing parts and components. Listening to make ordering by phone and taking notes in oral communication. Reading various types of technical texts and charts with reasonable comprehension, using a variety of reading skills such as skimming, scanning and reading for detail. Utilizing all available information such as graphs, charts, diagrams and pictures to understand texts Writing short guided texts using relevant vocabulary, basic sentence structure and reasonably correct spelling and punctuation. Context and needs analysis The context of the course is based on various factors such as time, available resources, classroom setting, people and the nature of the course. the course duration is 10 weeks with two hours daily on Monday, Tuesday and Friday starting from 5.30pm to 7.30pm. The students will meet the cost of the course and the course will take place at ….. The classroom setting will be teacher-fronted (Nunan, 1999) therefore the teacher will stand in front of the class and the students will sit in rows facing the teacher. The class will consist of about 10 to 15 students. There will be critical assessment of the students’ needs in areas such as listening, speaking, writing and reading. This will assist in determining the concepts taught in class as well as the techniques applied to enhance student knowledge and meet the demand for technical communication skill (Gardner & Miller, 1999). The needs analysis will be thorough administration of questionnaires to the students aspiring to join the class as well as continuous assessment of students’ needs over the duration of course in regard to class objectives. This continuous assessment will aid in the critical evaluation of the students’ weaknesses (White, 1988). This technique has the proven ability to enhance reliability as well as validity of the procedures, thus effective and efficient in the collection of data in relation to students’ needs . In order to enhance the effectiveness and appropriateness of the evaluation process, assessments will seek to incorporate various characteristics of the learners in the class as well as use suitable learning techniques (Graves, 1996). Syllabus The most used syllabus for this course is the product –oriented syllabus. The product-oriented syllabus entails functional, competency, situational, grammatical structure and lexical skills. The syllabus targets impact on the process that the learner acquires the skills as outlined in a process-oriented syllabus but how the acquired skill will be beneficial to the learner in a practical context. Therefore, a product-oriented syllabus is ideal for this syllabus. The syllabus will also feature situational syllabus whereby the learners will learn communication skills in a given context. There will be also the competency based syllabus that will enable the learners to acquire necessary skills for completing tasks in different contexts. Additionally, the syllabus will encompass the functional syllabus to enable learners to acquire communicative skills for example directing, instructing, naming, ordering and assembling among others. This will be conducted using a structural and informational focus on the valuable techniques in understanding English concepts with reference to reading, writing, speaking and listening. The contextual focus, under the influence of situation, will facilitate students’ understanding of the environment. In addition, the content of the course will focus on functional or notional syllabus to address students’ needs and preferences. The course will also seek to adopt and implement the essence of a language syllabus with reference to relevant skills and methodology (Nation & Mcalister, 2010). In learning the language, the intermediate students will use receptive or productive language skills as well as focus on skill acquisition. The use of these techniques is vital in acquiring the appropriate technical communication skills to further develop the students’ English language ability in other courses. There are four units covered within a period of ten weeks with one unit per week and two-assessment test in between. Unit one is check-up and it entails meeting, greetings and introducing each other, the unit also entails how to use dates and times i.e using numbers, making appointments and talking about travel timetables. The first hour of the week one will commence with introduction to the course content in addition to explaining the aims and objectives of the course. Week 2, 3 and 4 will cover naming, assembling, ordering and tools. The fifth week students will be required to review units 1-2 and questions. They will also need to work on the homework. A test will be conducted in the same week for a period of 50 minutes (see appendix 1). Part 2 will be covered from week 6 to 8 and it will include modules on functions, locations, letters & numbers. Then there is week 8 that will cover movement such as directions, instructions and actions while the tenth week is review of units 3-4 and students will answer the questions and will be required to correct the homework. The same week a test will be conducted (see appendix 1). Teaching materials In order to develop and select effective teaching materials, the students’ needs will be put into consideration in order to choose, adapt and organize the materials so to attain the course objective of developing effective technical communication skills (Feez, 1999). Moreover, the selected textbooks for teaching are also based on choosing, adapting and organizing the content. The process is important because the units on the syllabus can be changed based on the selected textbooks. Student’s opinions will be essential as it could help to determine whether the textbooks and other teaching materials meet their needs. Various materials will be used with the aim of ensuring the students acquire competence in various sections of the curse such as summarizing texts, use of vocabularies and group discussions (Richards & Lockhart, 1994). An example of an important teaching material will be instructing the students on how to cooperate in group work and correct each other when they are less competent in particular areas of the course. Another teaching material that will be significant is the use of printed materials such as books, pamphlets and journals that contain ideas of how curriculum should be developed by the teacher to equip learners with the ability to communicate in English as well as use a number of vocabularies during communication (Richards and Rodgers, 2001). The books that will enable effective teaching will be those that put more emphasis on communication skills and written in simple language that can be understood by most learners during teaching. In addition, the teacher will use presentation techniques where students will be instructed to come up with presentation activity that involves communication and how customers can be handled by applying friendly communication skills as well as improving audibility (Supanit, Kulsiri, 2008). The teacher will also use radio lessons where students will be asked to listen to a topic on business communication in cases and asked to apply the skills learned to communicate among themselves in their groups. Another resource that will be of significance during teaching is a book containing vocabularies used during business communication such as how to greet a customer and how to convince a customer to buy a product. These vocabularies will be explained to the students and they will be asked to come up with business cases where such vocabularies can be used. The design of this unit is therefore based on activities and materials from the selected resources. Some of the activities have been modified and new items created (Nation and Mcalister. 2010). Some of the changes that are applied in adaptation of the materials and activities are adding, rewriting, and adaption to meet the aims and the objectives. For example, all the units are characterized by four distinct pars that is language function, vocabulary/expression, reading & writing and finally listening and speaking. Listening skills will be provided to students by referring to books that provide instructions on the right listening skills. Learners will then be instructed to listen by applying these skills. This will ensure they understand better the methods of communication in a business environment. Evaluation of the Activities There are a number of ways in which these activities will enable the achievement of learning goals and ideology of this study. For instance, the leaning ideologies of this study is based on equipping students with the ability to speak by pronouncing certain words which are not easy to pronounce, equip the students with the ability to correct the mistake made by fellow students and make students be able to read different texts and understand new vocabulary and have the ability to transfer information from reading materials to other means of communication such as writing then down or communicating the information to other listeners (Nunan & Carter, 2001). The activities will be important in ensuring the students are able to apply literary skills such as speaking skills gained in classroom to communicate with a customer and convey the message intended for the respondent without distorting the content of the information. Students will also be allowed to work in pairs so that they can correct each other’s mistakes. In addition, the learners will be able to improve their grammars skills by learning methods of increasing their competencies in these areas. For instance, they will be able to summarize information and develop background idea about information in reading texts and define words in a presentable manner. In addition, students will also be able to obtain the main points of discussion in reading texts and communicate the information within a short period of time so that an immediate listener can understand the main points of a discussion. This is because the ideology of this study is to provide the students with the ability to create a summary of the information written in a text and convey it without changing the meaning of the information (See appendix 2). The ideology that will be useful in achieving the learning needs of this project is that it is based on behaviorist theory as a resultant of hard work by students, cognitive learning as approaches that enable understanding of the language topics being studied. The competencies learnt based on these theories will be applied in assisting students to communicate with customers (See appendix 2). This learning activity will also involve ensuring students are provided with cognitive learning skills which are important in understanding other language such as English grammar and overall literacy. This will enable students apply vocabulary of various kinds when communication with customers to suit a particular context as well as enable understanding of English vocabulary by adult learners. Furthermore, the students will be equipped with the competence in the use of English and Arabian when speaking to one another thus facilitating discussions and communications. The ability to read different texts and the use of technical vocabulary will ensure the students are able to use English vocabulary at the right point during communication. It is also aimed at equipping students with the ability to translate information from one language to another thus allowing communication in either English or Arabic. This study is also aimed at equipping students with styles of pronouncing words and sentences in both English and Arabic so that sentences can be read audibly and understood by any person who cannot read what is written down (See appendix 2). Assessment Assessment process will involve ascertaining whether the students have grasped the concepts being taught during the study processes. The assessment process will involve the application of formative methods of assessment where assessment will be done throughout the duration of the course. This will involve assessing students in methods of communication followed by assessing whether the learners have acquired discussion skills. This will be followed by assessing the capability of students to use vocabulary of different types by applying them in sentences and comm8unication. The next stage of assessment will involve assessing the ability of students to summarize information in a text to a condensed form without changing the meaning of the sentences. Finally students will be assessed on their listening skills by determining the extent to which they can take instructions given in English so and apply them in performing tasks such as doing assignments and relating to one another during language classes (Supanit, 2008). The instructor will play a key role in assessing the progress of the students and their mastery of the course. These tests will be designed in a similar structure and based on the objectives of the unit such as the ability to use vocabulary effectively, ability to construct grammatically correct sentences and the ability to work in groups. The tests will be used to determine where the students have demonstrated any weaknesses in the subject such as the difficulties in the use of certain vocabulary to construct sentences, lack of cooperation in group work and inability to summarize information into a compressed text without changing the meaning of a sentence. Students who show difficulties in working in groups will be guided further on methods of cooperating in group work and how to listen to the opinions of groups’ members and learning from one another during group discussions. Those who show inability to use of vocabulary to construct meaningful sentences will be assisted by providing them with examples of sentences of similar kind so that they can use similar methods to come up with their own sentences. Those who show difficulties in summarizing texts will be provided with the competence of how to extract important points in a text and writing them in a summary (Nunan, & Lamb 1996). The assessments will involve assessing the participation of students which will take place between the first and the third week. This assessment will account for 30% of the overall grade. Homework will be given to all the students between the first and the third week and this will account for 15% of the total score. The first test will be given in the 5th week and this will account for 20% of the total score. The second homework will be given to the students in week 7 which will constitute 15% of the total score and the second test will be provided to the students in the 9th week and will constitute 20% of the total score. This will result into an overall student score of 100% (See appendix 2). Evaluation Course evaluation will involve establishing whether the learning experiences have been effective to the students by the extent to which they have been equipped with skills which increases their competence in understanding, communicating and writing English language. Formal evaluation will involve establishing whether the goals of providing the students with the capability to summarize texts written in English have been achieved. It will also involve establishing whether learners are able to understand the meanings of various vocabularies and apply them to construct meaningful sentences (Richards, 1990). The required strengths will be the ability of learners to implement vocabularies during the course to communicate with each other and construct meaningful sentences. Another key concept is ability of students to cooperate in group work and learn various language skills from one another. Furthermore, the ability of students to grasp the main information in a text and put it in summary form and the ability of the learners to use the language skills to communicate with one another with little difficulties will be explored. The expected weaknesses will be the inability of students to correct each other during group works and lack of cooperation among students. Another weakness will be inability of students to apply some vocabularies in communication with one another and communicate in properly constructed sentences. In addition, the weakness of inability to summarize information in a text to a particular length without changing the meaning of sentences will be observed. In addition, the challenge of inability of the students to understand the instructions from the instructor will be a weakness since wit will prevent driving the main information to learners and prevent their ability to understand the topic (Richards & Lockhart, 1994). In order to enable the teacher know the effectiveness of the teaching process during the study, a summative evaluation will be given to the teacher by all the students. The evaluation will enable the teacher know the extent to which students were satisfied with the manner in which they were taught the subject such as , their ability to cooperate in group work, the use of vocabularies and the ability of the students to summarize a text into a short paragraph without changing the meanings of the paragraphs. Students will also provide their evaluation of the competencies they have obtained in terms of their abilities to communicate with little difficulties as a result of the lessons learnt during the course (Janet & Katherine, 2005). During the course of learning, formative evaluation will also be used by teachers during one-on-one meetings between the students and the teacher during office hours and through random feedback from students during class sessions. This will be achieved by allowing each student to consult the teacher at their free time so that the teacher can establish the areas where each one of them shows difficulties in the subject such as the use of vocabularies or creating summaries of texts (Nunan & Lamb, 1996). This will provide the teacher with an approach to use when teaching the students by focusing on the areas of weakness of each student. References Anderson, P. V. (2014). Technical communication: A reader-centered approach. Gardner, D. & Miller, L. (1999). 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(1994). Reflective Teaching in Second Language Classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press  Janet Swaffar & Katherine Arens (2005). Remapping the foreign language curriculum: An approach through multiple literacies. New York : Modern Language Association of America.  Ur, Penny. (1996). A Course in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press  Shohamy, E. G. (2006). Language policy: hidden agendas and new approaches. London: Routledge  Supanit, Kulsiri, (2008). Foreign language curriculum analysis.VDM: Verlag.  Van Lier, T. (1996). Interaction in the language curriculum: Awareness, autonomy, and authenticity. London: Longman.  White, Ronald. (1988). The ELT Curriculum, Design, Innovation and Management. London: Blackwel  Kumar. N. (2011). Communication skills for professionals. London: PHI Learning Pvt. Ltd Read More