New Concepts In Curriculum Development And The ELT Reform In Compulsory Education

Curriculum is a plan for all the learning experiences in and out of school in terms of needs analysis, objectives setting, syllabus design, materials design, teaching methodology, and evaluation. Curriculum development then is the process in which the raw data about a learning need is interpreted in order to produce an integrated series of teaching-learning experience, whose ultimate aim is to lead the learners to a particular state of knowledge (Hutchinson, 1987: 65). This thesis intends to examine the new concepts in curriculum development in terms of needs analysis, syllabus design, materials design, methodology, and evaluation, aiming to draw inferences in the English curriculum reform in compulsory education. The reason for the study of every curriculum component is that these components represent all the procedures and learning experiences in the whole learning process, and the respective analysis of these components, especially the investigation of the new concepts underlying each component, will present the English teachers the ideas of how to operate well in the whole teaching process. Needs analysis is the first step in curriculum development. In the large class size in China's context, it is not an easy-going job to identify and satisfy individual needs, but meeting individual needs is one of the basic concepts in the New English curriculum (2001) and is what modern ELT requires. Hutchinson's (1987) framework for analyzing learner's needs in the form of questions concerning five "W"s and how provides the teachers and practitioners with a workable and feasible way in needs analysis. Needs can be assessed with different focuses on the learners' specific purposes, or their language proficiency, or their psychological state, or on all of them. Needs can be viewed in terms of students' desires, experts' judgments and society's requirements (Johnson, 1990; Els, 1984; Widdowson, 1981; Hutchinson, 1987). No matter whether the needs are defined from the perspectives of the students, the experts, or the society, they should be both goal-oriented as well as process-oriented. Information about learner's needs can be gathered in various ways. The more workable and practical ways in collecting such information are questionnaires, tests, interviews and consultations. We believe that it is desirable to use more than one of these ways. Syllabus design is to decide what gets taught and in what order. For this reason, the theory of language explicitly or implicitly underlying the ways of selection and gradation will play a major role in determining what syllabus is adopted. Krahnke (1987: 74-86) suggested some other factors affecting syllabus choice and design: program factors including goals and objectives, instructional resources, accountabilityand measurement, teacher factors, student factors, and other issues concerning needs analysis, reductionism, flexibility of syllabus design, cyclic versus linear syllabuses, etc. The choice of syllabus in China goes through the history of ranging from more or less purely linguistic syllabuses to the purely semantic or functional ones. Different syllabuses have their own benefits and each type of syllabus has its own scope for effectiveness. It is decidedly premature to abandon the traditional, grammatical/structural approach completely and sequence language materials exclusively along situational or functional-notional or skill-based, topic-based, task-based, discourse-based, content-based and themed-based lines, especially in elementary courses for general purposes. Task-based syllabus, highly advocated in the New English Curriculum (2001), is undergoing a national-scale experiment in the English curriculum reform in China because the intent of task-based learning is to use learners' real-life needs and activities as learning experiences, providing motivation through immediacy and relevance. However, the textbooks correspondent with task-based syllabus are rarely seen in China up till now, and teachers need to invest time and effort in the study of task-based ap...