Curriculum Development and Planning

Successful language teaching is dependent on the activities of curriculum development.

Curriculum Development refers to all aspects of planning, implementation and evaluation of a programme – the what, how, how well, as well as the what of the teaching-learning process.

We have covered the following areas of curriculum development:

1. Learners – there are three elements teachers should know about their learners: who are their learners, what their needs are, and why they want to learn.
   
   
2. Institution – this is where people learn a course. In this section, you learned more about the environment, the management, staffing and courses offered.
   
   
3. Effective Teaching - in this section we covered three areas – the teacher, the course framework and methodology. A good language teacher will have effective knowledge of the language being taught, the linguistics of the language and teaching skills. The second area we looked at is the course framework – such as designing the structure of the course, creating learning objectives as well as thinking about what approach to use in terms of methodology. We learned more about eight different approaches to teaching methods:
   
   
   1. Grammar Translation Method
   2. Direct Method
   3. Audio-lingual Method
   4. The Silent Way
   5. Community Language Learning
   6. Total Physical Response
   7. Communicative Language Teaching
      
      
4. Evaluation – in this section we looked at how to take a systematic approach to the evaluation of a course in order to promote the ongoing development and improvement of a course, assess how effective and efficient the course is, and take feedback from people involved in the course, both staff and learners.
   
   
5. Glossary – in this final section there is a list of words with their meanings.