Chapter 6

Richards, J. 2001. Course planning and syllabus design. In Curriculum development and language teaching. New York: Cambridge University Press. 145-196.

This chapter focused on planning a course to meet the aims or outcomes of a language program and outlined the process planners usually follow when planning a new course. This chapter also focused heavily on syllabus design. It discussed the various types of syllabi and the skills that are focused on with each design.

As someone who is currently planning and gathering materials for new courses I found this chapter to be extremely helpful. It’s amazing how much thought and planning has to go into a course. I found myself already thinking about the rationales for the new courses and thinking about the type of syllabus I would like to use in the course. In addition, I also found myself thinking about some of the current courses that are already in place and tried to identify the rationales, type of syllabus, etc. for those courses as well. I find that in my own course planning I often haven’t thought about everything I need to and it makes it difficult to know for me where we are going each day and why we are headed in this direction.

I was hoping someone could give me a better picture of how I could use a module instructional block in my classroom. I am not that familiar with the module instructional block setting and am having difficulty visualizing what that would look like in a language classroom. I also would like to discuss more in depth development of scope and sequence of a course. When planning my current courses I find that planning of the scope and sequence is the hardest for me, especially when teaching in content areas I am unfamiliar with.