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Teachers and course design: the case for a modular approach
Rob Batstone has taught English in Britain, Portugal, Italy, and Egypt. While working for the British Council in Cairo he designed and administered a project to implement a modular syllabus. He has a Dip. TEO from the University of Manchester, and is currently doing research at the University of London Institute of Education.
Foreign language course design is not, perhaps, the thriving issue that it once was. Following considerable activity in the 1970s, interest has turned more to questions of methodology, and to approaches where the learners' conscious attention is on ‘meaning-focused activities’, where little or no specific attention is paid to language form (cf.Prabhu 1987). There seems to be growing disenchantment with more traditional course designs, containing layers of linguistic specifications, often sequenced and integrated by the course designer in a way which can severely limit the teachers' scope for responding flexibly to student needs. This article, addressed to teacher trainers and course designers as well as to teachers, compares this more traditional approach with a ‘modular’ framework, devised by the present writer for the British Council Teaching Centre in Cairo. A modular framework stands somewhere between what I call the traditional (syllabus-oriented) and the ‘meaning-focused’ (methodology-oriented) approaches, by giving the teacher some of the responsibilities traditionally allocated to the course designer.