The Analysis of The Syllabus
The Analysis of The Syllabus
Title of the textbook: Longman English Grammar Practice for Intermediate students
Writer : L. G Alexander
A structural syllabus or grammatical syllabus is doubtless the most familiar of syllabus types.
It is one in which the content of language teaching is a collection of the forms and structures, usually
grammatical, of the language being taught. Examples of structure include: nouns, verbs, adjectives,
statements, questions, complex sentences, subordinate clauses, past tense, and so on, although
formal syllabi may include other aspects of language form such as pronunciation or morphology.
The structural Syllabus has a long history, and a major portion of language teaching has been
carried out using some form of it. The structural syllabus is based on a theory of language that
assumes that the grammatical or structural aspects of language form are the most basic or useful.
When functional ability, or ability to use or communicate in the new language, is a goal of
instruction, the structural syllabus can be said to embrace a theory of learning that holds that
functional ability arises from structural knowledge or ability. The content of the structural syllabus is
language form, primarily grammatical form, and the teaching is defined in terms of form. Although
the definition of language form and the most appropriate "grammar " to use in pedagogy have long
been disputed, most existing structural syllabi use some form of traditional, Latin -based,
descriptive/prescriptive grammatical classification and terminology. The usual grammatical
categories are the familiar ones of noun, verb, pronoun, adjective, singular, plural, present tense,
past tense, and so on. The domain of structural syllabi has tended to be limited to the 27 sentences.
That is, the sentence is the largest unit of discourse that is regularly treated. A classification of
sentence types usually includes semantically defined types such as statements or declaratives,
questions or interrogatives, exclamations, and conditionals, and grammatically defined types such as
simple, compound, and complex sentences. A good deal of morphology can also be found in
structural syllabi, such as s in gul a r and plural marking, the forms marking the tense system of the
language, and special morphology such as det erm iners and articles, prepositions and postpositions,
gender markers, and so on. Morphology also deals with vocabular y, specifically formal aspects such
as prefixes and suffixes. A key feature of the structural syllabus is that it is "synthetic" (Wilkins, 1976;
Yalden, 1983). Synthetic syllabi require analyses of the language (content), such word frequency
counts, grammatical analysis, and d i s course ana l ysis. The syllabus designer uses the elements
isolated as a result of the analyses to make up the content of the syllabus. In most cases there are
rules, p atter ns and g r am m ati c al elements, u s u a l l y with guidelines for their combination and
use. Because of their synthetic nature, structural syllabi assume a gene r al theory of learning that
holds that learners can synthesize the material being taught in one of at least two ways. First, the
analyzed information - the rules and patterns -are available as the learner attempts to use them in
linguistic communication. The l e a r n e r uses the information either to generate or produce
utterances or discourse, or to check the accuracy of production. Second, anal yz ed information is
transformed from analyzed, possibly conscious knowledge, into the largely unconscious behavior
that makes up language use.
The table below is the major criteria of the structural syllabus and the identification of the textbook
that we’ve found.
Conclusion
After analysed we the contents of the textbook titled ‘Longman English Grammar Practice for
Intermediate students’, we found out that the possible types of syllabus that the writer have
arranged is “the structural syllabus”.