General syllabus design

The terms curriculum and syllabus are sometimes used interchangeably, sometimes
differentiated, and sometimes misused and misunderstood.
Syllabus design can be defined as selection and organization of instructional content
including suggested strategy for presenting content and evaluation (Brown, 1995)
Curriculum is a broad description of general goals by indicating an overall educational-
cultural philosophy which applies across subjects together with a theoretical orientation to
language and language learning.
Syllabus is a detailed and operational statement of teaching and learning elements which
translates the philosophy of the curriculum into a series of planned steps leading towards
more narrowly defined objectives at each level.
Syllabus components
In general, the components of syllabus consist of: objectives (or competencies in
competency-based syllabus), instructional contents, learning experiences, evaluation.
The syllabus needs to be development to address students’ needs, to actualize the institutional
goals and objectives as well as to develop content standard and graduate competence
standard (SKL) into the existing teaching and learning process of related schools.

Technically, the steps of syllabus design cover the following: planning, implementation,
evaluation and revision.
The steps of in developing syllabus are the following:
Planning and Specification stage:

1. Identify existing content standard, graduate competence standard, resourceful materials,

and textbooks 2. Use the information collected through needs analysis related to students’
background knowledge and expectation. 3. Identify competencies given in the content
standard (competence standards and basic competencies) and graduate competence standard
(SKL) 4. Formulate basic competencies into core materials (you can use relevant materials
taken from standard English textbooks) 5. Analyze core materials, using ‘learning task
analysis’, to identify both grammatical elements/textual meanings and Ideational meanings
(main ideas and supporting ideas for written texts) by considering:

• three learning domains as suggested in the goals of teaching English (cognitive/intellectual

skills, psychomotor, and affective domains);

• supporting competencies, e.g. linguistic, socio-cultural, and discourse competencies •

students’ prior knowledge and skills (taken from information collected through need
analysis)
• the existing learning resources including teacher’s competencies
6. Decide evaluation tools by considering the formulated indicators 7. Determine time
allocation by considering, indicators, material coverage, students’ prior knowledge/level, etc.
8. Determine learning resources used
Dissemination and Implementation stage:
1.Develop testing (eg. Pre-test, Formative test, and Achievement test)
2. Develop teaching materials
3. Train teachers or socialize the syllabus and its components
4. Conduct on-going evaluation of the program implementation

Evaluation is conducted by a team or related experts including related subject matter teachers.
The result of evaluation is used to reconstruct the syllabus
Exist some Factors affecting syllabus design and choice:

Broadly defined settings and structural knowledge (except for young learners) and
communicative ability in specific situations as a result of need analysis. This can lead to the
practice of selecting combination of topical, functional, structural, situational, and skill (or
competence) in syllabus design (Krahnke, 1987)
Teacher factors (teacher’s competencies in teaching English)
Student factors (student’s prior knowledge, skills and level, students’motivation)
References:
Karavas, E. Applied Linguistics to Foreign Language Teaching and Learning Unit 5: Foreign
Language Curriculum and Syllabus Design
http://opencourses.uoa.gr/modules/document/file.php/ENL5/Instructional%20Package/presentat
ions/PDFs/Unit5_Accessible.pdf

Sundayana, W. Syllabus design for teaching English in the context of school-level

curriculum development. Taken from:
http://file.upi.edu/Direktori/FPBS/JUR._PEND._BAHASA_INGGRIS/195802081986011-
WACHYU_SUNDAYANA/ESP_Material_Development/SYLLABUS_DESIGN_(HO_ES
P_Mate_Dev_Topic%23_4).pdf