Syllabus Characteristics

A well-designed language teaching syllabus seeks mainly (a) to clarify the aims and objectives of learning and teaching, and (b) to indicate the class-room procedures the teacher may wish to follow. More specifically, any

syllabus, according to Breen (2001, p. 151), should ideally provide the fol-lowing:

· A clear framework of knowledge and capabilities selected to be appro-priate to overall aims;

· continuity and a sense of direction in classroom work for teacher and students;

· a record for other teachers of what has been covered in the course;

· a basis for evaluating students’ progress;

· a basis for evaluating the appropriateness of the course in relation to overall aims and student needs, identified both before and during the course;

· content appropriate to the broader language curriculum, the particu-lar class of learners, and the educational situation and wider society in which the course is located.

Of course, the assumption behind this ideal list of syllabus objectives is that they will enable teaching to become more organized and more effective. In that sense, a syllabus is more a teaching organizer than a learning indicator, although a well-conceived and well-constructed syllabus is supposed to re-late as closely as possible to learning processes.

But to expect any close connection between teaching design and learn-ing device is to ignore the role of learner intake factors on intake processes that we discussed in chapter 2. It is precisely for this reason Corder (1967) talked about the notion of a “built-in-syllabus” that learners themselves con-struct based on the language content presented to them and in conjunc-tion with intake factors and processes. As Corder rightly asserted, the learner syllabus is organic rather than linear, that is, learners appear to learn several items simultaneously rather than sequentially retaining some, rejecting others and reframing certain others. What is therefore needed is a psycholinguistic basis for syllabus construction.

A well-known work that attempted to determine a possible set of psycholinguistically valid criteria for syllabus construction was reported by Manfred Pienemann and his colleagues. In a series of empirical studies, Pienemann (1984, 1987) investigated the acquisitional sequence of Ger-man word order rules:

Stage 1: X = canonical order

Romance learners of German as a Second Language (GSL) start out with a subject–verb–object order as their initial hypothesis about German word order, for example, die kinder spielen mit ball (‘the children play with the ball’).

Stage 2: X + 1 adverb-preposing

For example, da kinder spielen (‘there children play’). This preposing rule is optional in German. But once this rules is applied, Standard German re-quires a word order like ‘there play children’ (i.e., inversion).

Stage 3: X + 2 = verb separation

For example, alle kinder muß die pause machen (‘all children must the break have’). Before the verb separation is acquired, the word order in the interlanguage is the same as in sentences with main verbs only (cf. the Eng-lish equivalent—all children must have a break). Verb separation is obligatory in Standard German.

Stage 4: X + 3 = inversion

For example, dann hat sie wieder die knoch gebringt (‘then has she again the bone bringed’). In Standard German, subject and inflected verbal element have to be inverted after preposing of elements.

From a group of Italian children learning German as a second language in a naturalistic environment, Pienemann selected 10 who were either at Stage 2 or Stage 3 in their L2 development. The subjects were given class-room instruction for 2 weeks on the structure from Stage 4, that is, inver-sion. When they were tested for the development of the newly instructed structure, Pienemann found that children who were at Stage 3 progressed to Stage 4, but children who were at Stage 2 remained at the same stage.

The study, he surmised, demonstrated that the relevant acquisitional stages are interrelated in such a way that at each stage, the processing prerequi-sites for the following stage are developed.

Based on his findings, Pienemann proposed what he called a learnability/

teachability hypothesis. The learnability hypothesis states that learners can benefit from classroom instruction only when they are psycholinguistically ready for it. The learnability of a structure in turn constrains the effective-ness of teaching, which is the teachability hypothesis. The teachability hy-pothesis predicts that instruction can only promote language acquisition if the interlanguage of the L2 learner is close to the point when the structure to be taught is acquired in the natural setting so that sufficient processing prerequisites are developed.

Notice that the teachability hypothesis does not claim that teaching has no influence whatsoever on L2 development. Rather, it maintains that the influ-ence of teaching is restricted to the learning items for which the learner is ready to process. Pienemann argued that, provided the learner is at the ap-propriate acquisitional stage, instruction can improve acquisition with re-spect to (a) the speed of acquisition, (b) the frequency of rule application,

and (c) the different linguistic contexts in which the rule has to be applied.

From his findings, Pienemann derived two general tenets for L2 teaching:

The principles of L2 development are not only a more reliable background for psycholinguistically plausible simple–complex criteria in material grading than the present intuitive procedures, but they are a necessary background for grading, since formal L2 learning is subject to a set of learning principles which are shared by formal and natural L2 developments. Thus, teaching is only possible within the margin determined by these principles. As a conse-quence, any learning task which contradicts these principles is not-learnable;

it would ask too much of the learner. (Pienamann, 1984, pp. 40–41)

The learnability/teachability hypothesis as an idea makes eminent sense and has pointed toward a fruitful line of research (see Pienamann, 2003, for a recent review of his and related works). However, its validity and its ap-plicability have been questioned because of the small size of the sample and also because of practical problems, like identifying the learners’ current state of grammar. Besides, further research by others (e.g., Lightbown, 1985) demonstrated that classroom learners develop their language in a sequence that has no bearing on the sequence introduced by the teacher. The general consensus now is that we just do not have adequate knowledge of the learner’s language-processing capacity in order to coordinate the teaching sequence with learning sequence.

In spite of the advances made in psycholinguistic research, our rationale for selecting and grading language input presented to the learner is no more objective today than it was more than a quarter century ago when Mackay (1965) discussed the highly subjective notions of “difficulty” and

“complexity.” Pointing out that selection is an “inherent” characteristic of any language teaching enterprise because, “it is impossible to teach the whole of language,” Mackey (1965) identified three major criteria for selec-tion: frequency, range, and availability. Frequency refers to the items that oc-cur the most often in the linguistic input that the learners are likely to en-counter. It is, therefore, tied to the linguistic needs and wants of the learners. Range, on the other hand, is the spread of an item across texts or contexts. In other words, an item that is found and used in several commu-nicative contexts is more important than the one that is confined to one or two contexts. Although frequency of an item answers the question how of-ten it occurs, range answers the questions where it is used, by whom, and for what purposes. Availability relates to the degree to which an item is neces-sary and appropriate, and it also corresponds to the readiness with which it is remembered and used.

Gradation deals with sequencing (which comes before which) and grouping (what goes with what) of linguistic items. According to Kelly (1969), syllabus designers have historically used three basic principles for

determining the sequencing of linguistic input: complexity, regularity, and productivity. The first principle suggests a movement from the easy to the difficult, the second from the regular to the irregular, and the third from the more useful to the less useful. Unlike sequencing, grouping is con-cerned with the systems of a language, and its structures (Mackey, 1965).

Grouping attempts to answer the question: What sounds, words, phrases, or grammatical structures can be grouped and taught together? For instance, the simple present (habitual) may be grouped with words like usually, often, and every, as in I go to the park every weekend. Similarly, words may be grouped together by association (chair, table, furniture, seat, sit, etc.).

The putting together of the selected and graded language input is gen-erally governed by the overall theoretical stance adopted by the syllabus de-signer. Once again, the L2 literature presents a plethora of syllabuses as re-flected in labels such as the structural syllabus, the notional-functional syllabus, the task-based syllabus, the discourse syllabus, the skill-based bus, the content-based syllabus, the process-syllabus, the procedural sylla-bus, and so forth. Although one can discern subtle and sometimes signifi-cant variations among these in terms of content as well as method of teaching, there are certainly overlapping features among them. A fruitful way of understanding the basic philosophy governing these types of syllabus is to put them into broad classifications.