Process – oriented Syllabuses – David Nunan

Chapter 4

Process –oriented syllabuses   pages 40-60

Book name: Syllabus Design

Written by: David Nunan

Summarized by: Saeed Mojarradi

Syllabuses, in which the focus was the grammatical, functional and notional building blocks out of which courses of various types can be constructed.

However in practice the new syllabuses were rather similar to those they were intended to replace. In both syllabuses, the focus tended to be on the end products or results of the teaching /learning process.

What alternatives do you see to the sorts of syllabuses dealt with so far?

 Some applied linguists have shifted focus from the outcomes of instruction. I.e. the knowledge and skills to be gained by the learner, to the processes through which knowledge and skills to be gained by the learner, to the processes through which knowledge and skills might be gained.

This shift in emphasis has been dramatized by the tendency to separate product-oriented syllabus design issues from process-oriented ones.

In British school of applied linguistics the focus tends to be either on process or product, but not on both.

In chapter 1 we argued that the planning, implementation, and evaluation of the curriculum should be seen as an integrated set of processes.

While relative emphases will vary depending on the context, environment, and purposes for which language teaching is taking place, both outcomes and processes will be specified.