ALIS Newsletter - February 2023 (Plain Text Version)
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In this issue: |
A RESEARCH-INFORMED APPROACH TO UPPER-LEVEL INTERACTIONAL SYLLABUS DESIGN Silvana Dushku, UCF Global English Language Programs, Orlando, FL, USA
The need for specialized ELT publications to facilitate the socialization of international students into academic communities of practice in English-speaking countries has long been recognized (see, for example, Crandall and Basturkmen, 2004). In the last decades, numerous publications have promoted the development of academic listening-speaking skills such as listening to lectures, note-taking, and making academic presentations. However, upper-level ELT materials with a strong interactional approach have been insufficient, despite demand. This article reports on how the findings of a research project to determine and verify the most frequent and functionally significant patterns of formal student spoken interaction were used to develop an interactional, upper-level ESL/EFL oral communication (OC) syllabus. Such a syllabus would promote communicative, interactional skills by developing an awareness of language use in various sociocultural contexts. The article first describes the OC syllabus design project. It presents its theoretical foundations by summarizing relevant developments in syllabus design and spoken corpus research. It then outlines the project design considerations and needs analysis and weighs in on research- and parameter-based syllabus design and validation. The Project (2010-2019) The research project idea to develop a new OC syllabus for upper level (B1-C1) international students originated at a large Midwestern university IEP. As it developed, it turned into the blueprint for a textbook series (Dushku & Thompson, 2021), which would be conceptualized based on the latest findings in syllabus design and spoken corpus research. It intended to address the needs of international adult and young adult English learners, including upper-level, IEP and Pathway students, teaching assistants (ITAs), visiting scholars, and post-doctoral researchers. Theoretical Underpinnings Developments in Syllabus Design and Spoken Corpus Research In the early 2000, a new vision of language instruction planning was becoming apparent, as evidenced in new trends in syllabus design. A movement away from the normative focus on forms and the predominance of grammar-based syllabi had been identified. More analytic, experiential approaches were becoming popular, which encouraged active learner involvement in their own learning and assessment, as well as learning through discovery and problem solving. Such trends aligned with the need to go beyond the achievement of linguistic competence and place a new emphasis on functional, pragmatic skills, intercultural competence development, and instruction of communication strategies. Also, in recent decades, a new exploratory approach past the three Ps (presentation, practice, production) that involved context-rich illustrations, guided discovery, and interaction was proposed. Further, new developments in language teaching technology created opportunities for blended instruction delivery. Amongst the technological affordances of these decades, the development of language corpora – such as the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE), the Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English (CANCODE), the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English among others – considerably impacted the research on spoken discourse. New findings on the frequency of collocations and spoken lexical chunks (e.g., vague expressions), spoken grammar (e.g., ellipsis), discourse (e.g., discourse markers), and pragmatics (e.g., communicative acts) opened new perspectives for OC syllabus design and instruction planning. Similarly, the creation of learner corpora such as the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI) allowed for new insights into learner language use, identification of learner error patterns by level of proficiency, and new support to materials design. An extensive review of these developments in syllabus design in large part fueled the design considerations for the project of designing an upper-level interactional syllabus. [For a list of references concerning the impact of corpus and other relevant research on syllabus design and methodology see Timmis, 2015.] Design Considerations Informed by developments in syllabus design and spoken corpus research findings, our project determined multiple design considerations for creating our upper-level interactional syllabus. Namely, the research informed the selection of the lexico-grammatical items in the syllabus. In addition, discourse and conversation analytic approaches determined the choice of lexico-grammatical items in the syllabus. Further design considerations included (1) using communicative act sets, the building blocks of interaction (e.g., adjacency pairs and three-part interchanges in context), as the core of the syllabus; (2) emphasizing how conversation is managed, including focus on participants, situation, and various socio-cultural contexts; (3) prioritizing spoken grammar and lexis along with introducing elements of interpersonal grammar; (4) highlighting affective and discourse factors impacting grammatical use; and (5) using formulaic language (fixed expressions) rather than the memorization of isolated language items as the target of instruction in order to promote lexical and pronunciation fluency development. In addition, our design considerations for the upper-level interactional syllabus included raising learners’ awareness of language use in and outside the classroom. We determined that our interactional syllabus needed to resonate with learner performance and delivery experiences, capture their needs, and enhance their potentials. Another goal was to engage learners in their own error analysis through noticing and maximize their exposure to language in real-life use. A final parameter for the syllabus approach was to be text- and task-based in that the syllabus would rely on authentic and pedagogically treated semi-authentic texts, as well as real-world tasks and projects. Needs Analysis Alongside researching and developing a comprehensive set of design considerations, we also conducted a multifaceted needs analysis to identify the current tendencies in OC curricula and teaching materials and obtain learner feedback on their upper-level OC course experiences. First, a survey of twenty UCIEP members about OC course textbooks and curricula commonly used in upper-level IEPs was administered to determine OC instructional preferences and the rationale behind them. An evaluation of nine identified textbooks’ topics and their scope and sequence was performed, too. In addition, five years of upper-level OC course student feedback at the abovementioned IEP were analyzed to capture students’ perception of their needs and expectations in such a course. The needs analysis revealed textbook topic and task trends, and the learners’ preferences for real-life, interactive communication tasks, conversation management skill training, and improvement of their cultural understanding. Example of a Unit Resulting from A Research-Informed Approach to Upper-Level Interactional Syllabus Design Table 1 provides an example of an upper-level interactional unit that resulted from our research-informed approach. The first column lists an example unit topic. The selection of instructional unit topics addressed interactional competence – developing language skills to accomplish social actions. To this purpose, the topics chosen related to students’ experiences inside and outside the classroom, ranging from connecting with each other and expressing themselves, sorting out problems and getting things done, as well as sharing their socio-cultural and academic experiences in various settings. The topics were ‘unpacked’ through enabling tasks and activities that culminated in a final interactional task or project-based presentation. TABLE 1. Example of unit 1 from the upper-level interactional syllabus.
Concluding Remarks The results of our research-informed project support the mandate to apply a framework, a set of parameters to guide syllabus design and evaluate its overall ability to capture essential linguistic, pragmatic, and pedagogical features (Timmis, 2015; Tomlison, 2013). Both addressing learners’ level of proficiency and authenticating and sequencing tasks and texts to reflect their level needs have been long-established parameters in materials development. Alongside such parameters, our project revealed that syllabus designers need to prioritize interpersonal and cultural appropriateness of language use. Such a parameter determines to what extent the syllabus can heighten learners’ pragmatic awareness by training them to become active listeners, sharper language observers, and ethnographers. To this purpose, lexico-grammatical language features can be organized around pragmatic categories, with interpersonal grammar and prosody features included in every instructional unit in the syllabus. Another key parameter for syllabus designers to consider is the explicit specification of the learning path and increasing level of complexity. This remains crucial to inform the planning of instruction and learning. Finally and most importantly, as our project demonstrates, reliance on current research and corpus findings, and learner error analysis data should remain a critical parameter that allows for the validation of the linguistic, rhetorical, and pragmatic aspects of oral communication to be addressed pedagogically. References Biber, D. (2007). University language: A Corpus-based study of spoken and written registers. John Benjamins. Crandall, E., & Basturkmen, H. (2004). Evaluating pragmatics-focused materials. ELT Journal, 58(1), 38-49. Dushku, S., & Thompson, P. (2021). Campus talk: Effective communication beyond the classroom. Edinburgh University Press. Timmis, I. (2015). Corpus linguistics for ELT: Research and practice. Routledge. Tomlinson, B. (2013). Developing principled frameworks for materials development. In B. Tomlinson (Ed.), Developing materials for language teaching (pp. 95-119). Bloomsbury.
Silvana Dushku is Faculty Administrator, Program Director, UCF Global English Language Programs. She taught EFL/ESL for four decades, and has contributed to program/teacher development, curriculum, and materials design nationally and internationally. |
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