Moving forward: planning a course

course

In some organisations, things like course materials, the syllabus and the timetable are planned for you. All (!) you have to do is implement it.
In other settings, you may have to plan a course (or a part of it) independently. This section aims to give you some help and advice.

Things to find out

Task 1: Before we start, what things do you think you will need know in order to plan?
What will you base a plan on? Make a few notes and then click here.

The first issue is to know where the students are now. Only you can answer the questions:
1. What can they do well?
2. What can they do more or less?
3. What can't they do?
The second issue is to know what targets the learners have. Again, only you can say:
1. What grammar do they need?
2. What skills do they need to practise? (Reading, writing, listening, speaking: some of them or all of them?)
3. What communicative functions do they need?
4. What other skills (e.g., pronunciation, reading certain types of text) do they need to improve?

Finding out

Task 2: OK. How do you find out the answers to 1 and 2?
Make a few notes and then click here.

There are two mains ways to find out where the learners are now:
1. Testing the students. This is not the place to explain how to design and administer tests. It's a technical area but needn't be horribly complicated. There is an essential guide to testing on this site but it is quite complicated.
  Tests have to be, however:
  - Complete: you need to test all the skills and the grammar as well as things like pronunciation.
  - Easy to administer: don't make it too long and daunting.
  - Reliable: don't rely too much on impressions. Have a proper mark scheme (2 marks for this, 5 for that and so on).
2. Relying on your own impressions or those of others.
  This is not as unreliable as you might think. Providing you have been paying attention, you will have a good idea what the learners can and can't do well.
There is only one sure way to find out where they want to be: ask them. Writing a good needs analysis is a difficult skill to acquire but simple questionnaires are easy enough to design. There is a guide to writing needs analyses in the in-service section of this site but, again, it is quite technical. You need to find out:
1. What sorts of skills they want: reading, writing, speaking, listening, pronunciation.
2. How highly they value things like: grammatical accuracy, vocabulary acquisition, speaking clearly, understanding what they read or hear and so on.
3. What they need the language for: work, travel, pleasure, reading etc. Here's an example of a basic needs analysis. Click here for the text in PDF format.
  
  Notice that, rather cunningly, we have included the learners' reactions to what happens in class now so that procedures and lesson types can be planned to match the preferences of the class.

Using the data

When you have the answers to questions 1 and 2, you can draw up a list and make a plan. It could look something like this, depending on the intensity of the course:

Area of need	Priority	Action plan
Listening to TV and the radio	Medium	Record the news in English from the TV and plan a lesson once a week using it.
Writing business emails	High	Spend two hours every week looking at the following: Informal emails to colleagues asking for information Polite emails to customers offering information Formal emails to suppliers asking for deliveries and action Method: Model text > Analysis > Planning > Writing > Sending > Receiving > Replying
Communicating wants and needs orally	High	Plan three lessons around: Getting information about a holiday and booking it Getting information about a new car and buying it Getting information about something they are interested in
Pronunciation especially intonation	High	Spend ten minutes at the end of each lesson focused on the intonation of the language which arose in the lesson.
Grammar especially tense forms	Medium	Insert two lessons per week to focus on: Past simple vs. Present perfect Ways of talking about the future Talking about habits and present states

and so on.
With luck, this will give you a blueprint to work from. You can, of course, especially if your learners are mature, draw up a plan like this and then discuss it with them.

Syllabus

The final thing to consider in this area is the range of types of syllabus which you can use. Nobody will properly expect a novice (or even quite experienced teacher) to write a whole syllabus from scratch. That is one reason we use coursebooks, of course.
However, if you are interested in this area, there is, naturally, a guide to syllabuses on this site.

Now you can go on to the next part: using materials and aids.