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Lecture-02

Lecture 02 discusses the importance of planning goals and learning outcomes in English-language courses, emphasizing the need for specificity in teaching English. It outlines key assumptions about educational planning, various ideologies that shape language curricula, and the distinction between aims, objectives, and competencies in instructional design. The lecture also addresses criticisms of using objectives and competencies in program planning, highlighting the necessity of including broader educational values in language curricula.

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5 views

Lecture-02

Lecture 02 discusses the importance of planning goals and learning outcomes in English-language courses, emphasizing the need for specificity in teaching English. It outlines key assumptions about educational planning, various ideologies that shape language curricula, and the distinction between aims, objectives, and competencies in instructional design. The lecture also addresses criticisms of using objectives and competencies in program planning, highlighting the necessity of including broader educational values in language curricula.

Uploaded by

raidbouabdellah07
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Lecture 02

Lecture 02: Planning goals and learning outcomes

INTRODUCTION

- Early planners of English-language courses regarded the purpose of language teaching as


self-evident.
-The goal of all courses was to teach English.
-The ESP movement argued that this approach was inadequate and that in order to teach
English it was necessary to find answers to much more specific questions: What kind of
English? At what level of proficiency? And fo what purposes?

ASSUMPTIONS UNDERLYING GOALS

- Three key assumptions characterize the approach to educational planning. They are:

1. People are generally motivated to pursue specific goals.


2. The use of goals in teaching improves the effectiveness of teaching and learning.
3. A programme will be effective to the extent that its goals are sound and clearly described.

GOALS

-Planning goals means determining the knowledge, skills, and values that educational planners
believe learners need to develop.
- Most language instructions describe their goals in terms of aims and objectives.

EISNER'S IDEOLOGIES

- In order to understand how educational systems shape decisions about what schools should
teach and the outcomes they seek to achieve, five ideologies (Eisner,1992) that shape the
nature of the language curriculum and the practices of language teaching should be considered.

-They are:
A- Academic Rationalism
B- Social and Economic Efficiency
C- Learner-Centeredness
D- Social Reconstructionism
E- Cultural Pluralism

- In developing goals for an instruction, planners put into consideration both the needs of
learners and society as well as their beliefs and ideologies about schools, learners, and
teachers.

- These values and peliefs provide the philosophical underpinnings for educational instructions
and the justification for the kinds

A- Academic Rationalism
This justification for the aims stresses the intrinsic value of the subject matter and its role in
developing the learner's intellect, humanistic values, and rationality. The content matter of
different subjects is viewed as a basis and mastery of content is an end in itself rather than a
means to solving social problems.

B. Social and Economic Efficiency

This educational philosophy emphasizes the practical needs of learners and society and the role
of an educational programme in producing learners who are economically productive.

C- Learner-Centeredness

This term groups together educational philosophies that stress the individual needs of learners,
the role of individual experience and the need to develop awareness, self-reflection, critical
thinking, learning strategies, and other qualities and skills that are believed to important for
learners to develop.

D- Social Reconstructionism

Schools must engage teachers and students in an examination of important social and personal
problems and seek ways to address them. Teachers must empower their students so that they
can recognize unjust systems class, race, or gender, and challenge them.

E- Cultural Pluralism

This philosophy argues that schools should prepare students to participate in several different
cultures and not merely the culture of the dominant social and economic group.

GOALS / AIMS / OBJECTIVES

- The terms god and mim can be used interchangeably to refer to a description of the general
purposes of an instruction, while the term objective refers to a more specific and concrete
description of purposes.

- An aim refers to a statement of a general change that a programme seeks to bring about in
learners.

-The purposes of aim statements are:

1- To provide a clear definition of the purposes of a program.


2- To provide guidelines for teachers, learners, and materials writers
3- To help provide a focus for instruction
4-To describe important and realizable changes in learning

- Although goals provide a clear description of the focus of an instruction, they do not describe
in details its focus. In order to give a more precise focus to goals, aims are often accompanied
by statements of more specific purposes. These are known as objecfives.
- An objective refers to a statement of specific changes a programme seeks to bring about and
results from an analysis of the aim into different components.

- Objectives generally have the following characteristics:

1. They describe what the aim seeks to achieve in terms of smaller units of learning.
2. They provide a basis for the organization of teaching activities.
3. They describe learning in terms of observable behaviour or performance.

The advantages of describing the aims of a course interms of objectives:

1. They facilitate planning. Once objectives have been agreed on, course planning, materials
preparation, textbook selection, and related processes can begin.
2. They provide measurable outcomes and thus provide accountability. Based on the degree of
achievement of objectives, the success or failure of a program can be measured.
3. They are prescriptive. They describe how planning should proceed and do away with
subjective interpretations and personal opinions.

CRITICISMS OF THE USE OF OBJECTIVES

-Although the use of objectives is seen a way of bringing structure to the process of course
planning, it has also attracted some criticism.

-The major criticisms of their use are:

1- Objectives turn teaching into a machine.


2- Objectives trivialize teaching and are product-oriented.
3- Objectives are unsuited to many aspects of language use.

Competencies Vs Objectives (F)

- An alternative to the use of objectives in programme planning is to describe learning outcomes


in terms of competencies, an approach associated with Competency-Based Language Teaching
(CBLT).

- Competencies refer to observable behaviour that are necessary for the successful completion
of real-world activities. These activities may be related to any domain of life, though they have
typically been linked to the field of work and to social survival in a new environment.

CRITICISMS OF THE USE OF COMPETENCIES

The use of competencies in programme planning is not without its critics:

1- No valid procedures are available to develop competency specifications.


1- The competencies selected as a basis for instruction typically represent value judgments
about what such participation involves.
Conclusion

A language curriculum typically includes other kinds of outcomes apart from language-related
objectives. If the curriculum seeks to reflect values related to learner centeredness, social re
constructionism, or cultural pluralism, outcomes related to these values will also need to be
included. Because such outcomes go beyond the content of a linguistically oriented syllabus,
they are sometimes referred to as nonlanguage outcomes. Those that describe learning
experiences rather than learning outcomes are also known as process objectives.

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