FOCUSING ON LANGUAGE CONTENT IN

COMMUNICATIVE SYLLABUS

Submitted to Fulfill an Assignment

On ESP Material Development

Lecturer: Eris Isnaini, S.Pd., M.Pd.

By:
Nurhidayati (12220300)
Maryuliana (12220336)
Alan Ranjani (12220306)
Sera Pramesti (12220218)

A2
REGULAR 2012

ENGLISH EDUCATION STUDY PROGRAM

LANGUAGE AND ARTS DEPARTMENT
SEKOLAH TINGGI ILMU KEGURUAN DAN ILMU PENDIDIKAN (STKIP)
SILIWANGI BANDUNG
2014
 CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Education is as an effort to educate the nation. In the Law on National Education

System also mentioned that the National education serves to develop skills and character
development and a dignified civilization in the context of the intellectual life of the nation.
Which has the objective to developing students' potentials, in order to be a man who is
faithful and devoted to God Almighty, noble character, healthy, knowledgeable, skilled,
creative, independent, and become citizens of a democratic and accountable.

In conjunction with an education that was established rules about what material
should be given to students, who are familiar with the "curriculum”. In this case, the
curriculum should be able to provide a fresh form of service to the students in order to obtain
optimal results. For so requires an approach that is considered to provide the service.

The curriculum is a set of plans and arrangements regarding the objectives, content
and learning materials and methods used to guide the implementation of learning activities to
achieve certain educational goals. Specific purposes include educational purposes as well as
compliance with the peculiarities of national, state and regional potential, education unit and
learners. Therefore curriculum prepared by the educational unit to allow adjustment of
educational programs to the needs and potential in the area.

Many things need to be considered in designing the curriculum, including program

development and appropriate learning materials, learning syllabus development and learning
model that will be used. After all arranged, we began to think of how to implement the
curriculum in the learning process in the classroom that students are expected to know and
understand the subject matter.

In communicative syllabus, language is focuses on communication. The goal of

language teaching is to develop “communicative competence”. Using the language
appropriately in social contexts is important and communicative competence should be
acquired. The teacher use communicative approach when implicate this syllabus.
Communicative approach is activities that involve real communication promote learning.
Language that is meaningful to the learner supports the learning process.

The purpose of this communicative syllabus is to enable learners use the language as
tool of communication on every aspect of their life. So students can enhance their skill and
the students to be more confident when interacting with other people and they also enjoy
talking more.. Not only learn about grammar but students can implicate the language in the
real word.
 CHAPTER II

DISCUSSION

A. Integrating Notional and Functional Meaning with Grammar, Thematic Content And
Lexis

A major difficulty in syllabus design is the fact that learning a language can not be
explained as learning single unit of any kind, be they notions, functions, structures, or lexis. It
is some combination of all these together, along with the earlier experience that the learners
brings to the task which accounts for language learning. ESL/EFL learners already posses a
solid knowledge of notions, functions, & lexis which underlie their first language. What
seems important to teach, therefore as Refers (1980) points out are the inter lingual contrast
between the notions in L1 & the target language.

As Rivers (1980:53) claims much more attention ought to be paid in classroom

teaching to the comprehensive & through assimilation of these essential conceptual
differences between language so that students are learning to operate within the total
language process, than picking up minor skills in its application.

The state of the art appears to be such that there is an immediate necessity find new
ways of teaching form & use together (Eskey 1983). Coursework designers require to the
following:

1. Present linguistic form systematically to enable learners to express the basic notions
of language. Furthermore, special emphasis needs to be placed on Interlingua differences
relating to the realization of notions.
2. Use communicative context to permit learners to interact within a variety of
communicative language function. Here again, emphasis must be placed on social cultural
language specific features in order to produced utterances which are appreciate to the cultural
setting among the lots of feasible choice available for expressing functions material must start
with those which are highly frequent in native speech & only gradually expanded to include
the less frequent two times (Canale & Swain 1980).
3. Use a variety of text types both in the oral & written form in order to create
communicative proficiency in all language skills, unless a specific calls for emphasis on or
language skills than on all.

A. 1. Developing Inventories

What is needed for course development is to combine forms, notions, functions, lexis
and language skills.

1. Inventory A: Notions and Grammar

Inventory A consist of two separate lists:

a) All the grammatical topics to be thought during the course,organized in a sequence
suitable for systematic learning and for generalization that can be developed along the way.

b) A list of notional categories to be thought during the course.

These two separate lists are then combined into units comprising notion and structures
in a way that allow us to show how notional categories and grammatical categories interact.

As an example of a combined teaching unit of notions and grammar, consider the

notion time and its interaction with the tense-aspect system in English. This unit has to be
broken down into teachable portions which may have to spread throughout the course,
creating a type of spiraling plan where the unit of time and tense-aspect recurs within
expanded topics every few weeks or so. Thus the planes might decide that the most logical
place to begin this unit is with the durative aspect which in English is probably different from
all other languages, requiring special focus in the materials.

Alternatively, planners may decide to begin with a description of time-less, static statements
such as factual information, routine activities and the like which are non-durative. The
decisions on sequence will be based on both linguistic generalizations, similarity, difference
for L1, and other didactic variables such as teachers’ abilities to provide examples and
contexts for the particular topic, availability of such a relevant context in the immediate
environment, and other similar considerations. The important point is that by working with
combined units of notions and structures, designers should be able to ensure the inclusion of
both types of categories throughout the syllabus.

2. Inventory B: Themes and Topic

Inventory B is a list of themes and topics. Its main purpose is twofold:

a) To provide appropriate cultural contextualization for the language material in the

syllabus;

b) To motivate interest by using topics that are relevant and appealing to a particular
group of learners.

This inventory is of vital importance and may ultimately make or break the course in
terms of its success in the classroom. The topics to be included may come from
questionnaires administered to potential students of similar age groups and interests as well
as from open discussions with students at a similar level.

Another strategy for topics selection is to integrate content from other subject matter
areas in the course curriculum. For example, major topics in history, geography, social
studies, or sciences. In the language pedagogy literature, this approach has been called
'language in the content area'.

3. Inventory C: Sociocultural Function

 Inventory C is a list of communicative, sociocultural functions which the planners
decide to include in the course of study. However, planners are faced with serious difficulties
since there is no reference text that provides a comprehensive description of speech act
behavior in English much less for the first languages of the learners.

What designers would need to know from such a reference text would be following
information about each speech act that they decide to include in the course plan:

1) The typical situations in which each speech act is used by native speakers. For
example, what are some typical situations in which native speakers of English tend to
apologize, complain, or compliment the hearer?
2) The extent to which the speech act changes in form / selection of particular utterance
according to the participants taking part.
3) The most frequent utterances that native speakers use to carry out this speech act in
formal and informal settings.

Sociolingustic research seems to be a long way from having comprehensive answers

to these questions. Designers may have to consult their intuitions about these matters or
consult with native speakers, if they are not themselves speakers of the TL. What is
important, however, is that planners try to look for answers to these questions before
embarking on incorporating speech acts into materials.

4. Combining The Three Inventories

The most difficult task in focus selection is combining the three inventories. The goal
is to create course plans which will consist of a theme (including related sub-topics), a list of
notions and grammatical structures, and a selection of functions. The first concern is: which
inventory should be the basic one? Here the answer depends entirely on course goal: the
linguistic inventory has traditionally been organized in a certain sequence so it fits everyone’s
cultural expectations.

It seems easy, therefore, to use inventory A for skeletal planning and then provide the
padding and the flesh of the units from inventories B and C. Whether the planners choose to
begin with Inventory A, B, or C as the pivotal core of the course will depend entirely on the
goals and the audiences they have in mind.

A. 2. The Choice of Lexis

In merging Inventories A and B, an issue arises that has not been discussed so far,
namely the choice of lexis or the stock of vocabulary items. This merger is a crucial step
since from it decisions are made within the thematic unit concerning the lexical items, to be
included. These lexical decisions must override other considerations, giving lexis the proper
emphasis and suitable focus it richly deserves within the thematic unit, otherwise learners
may not be able to take full advantage of the elements of the theme.
 By using the inventory system, designers are able to choose new lexical items which
draw on the selected theme. As a result, semantically related words can be presented in varied
contexts, all deriving from that theme. Then, when learners come across unfamiliar words
they are able to make hypotheses about their meanings which they can realistically test. In
this way, the lexical content forms the input upon which learner work. But input alone is far
from sufficient. The next task is for materials writers to produce effective workouts for
classroom practice which foster the mastery of new lexical items.

B. Discrete and Holistic View: the horns of a dilemma

B. 1. The Holistic View

The holistic view has been in the limelight in the recent, communicative period wtih
three distinct strands contributing to its upturn.

a) First, it has gained prominence throigh the influence of a humanistically- oriented

philosophy of education in which the development of the whole person is stresssed. This
view emphasizes the total individual and his/her needs for using language as the basic goal to
be met by the curriculum.
b) Second, the unit of anlysis of language inself has come to be viewed by linguistic
scholars and those in related disciplones not as a single sentence, but rather as longer spans of
language or discourse.
c) Third influence which has brought holistic practices into wide acceptance can be
traced to the influence of mother-tongue intruction, or the language arts field typified by
practices which foster language development in young children. These practices seem 'right'
to teachers because they come closer to real communication. However, they go againts
specialists ideas of what is exact or precise becausse they fail to include discrete analyses of
language.

B. 2. The Discrete View

In contrast, second and foreign language instruction has to a great extent, incorporated
the discrete elements view of language, particularly in audiolingual and cognitive-code
approach. Even in the recent period, whether the content has been grammatical sructures or
semantic concepts expressed as notions, we have relied on analyses of language in
constructing inventories which depend for their discovery procedures on processes of
issecting and segmenting into elements : IN linguistic science these discrete entities are given
names such as phonemes, morphemes and sentence. When we work with illocutionary
meaning, speeech acts, or functions in language, we tend to seek ways of putting such
elements into similiar categories. Moreover, the fact that we lack refernce texts which
describe language functions leaves us feeling dissatisfied.
B. 3. Evidence of The Discrete vs. Holistic Paradox in Language Content, Process and

Holistic education is the practice of freedom for creativity and productivity or 'work'.
Work is meaningful when motivation is stimulated by natural curiosity. This makes it
Motivating at all ages. "... It is in fact nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of
instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiostiy of inquiry; for this delicate little
plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to rack
and ruin without fail. "(Albert Einstein).

Holistic education by Jeremy Henzell-Thomas referred to under Latifah (2008) is an

effort to build a full and balanced on each student in all aspects of learning, including
spiritual, moral, imaginative, intellectual, cultural, aesthetic, emotional, and physical aspects
of directing all -aspects towards achieving an awareness of the relationship with God which is
the ultimate goal of all life on earth.

Each area, the contents of the language, processes and products can be viewed both
from the point of view of discrete and holistic perspective, creating a continuum with discrete
perspectives on the end of one and a holistic perspective on the other. Discrete point
(discrete) focuses on the shape (form), accuracy and analysis while the holistic point focuses
on the function fluency, and use.

1) Form and Function

(Sapir 1921), or grammatical form as distinct form function, has been accepted as a
basic understanding about the nature of language for a very long time. Also from Sapir’s
writings, we understand that human languages differ in the manner in which forms represent
functions. In the way we have used the term, language content includes both formal
properties (grammar) and all types of meaning (notions, functions, social norms for use, etc.)

On the other hand, topical and thematic approaches to organizing language instruction
appear to be quite holistic, composed as they are stuff which does not lend itself to being set
out in any kind of sequential fashion, based on criteria of internal organization.

2) Accuracy and Fluency

Fluency, on the other hand, has been associated with communicating one’s idea,
getting the meaning across, or in the terms of the dichotomy, using language either
holistically or comprehensively.

Accuracy process is aspects of language content that are conducive to analysis

through dissection. Holistic process, on the other hand, hold out the promise of drawing on
ways to look at language which are instead based on larger, more complex systems.

But it is a mistake to assume that all fluency workouts fail to consider the systematic
properties of language. It is possible to create holistic workouts which attend to cultural and
social norms that are outside the language code, but which still focus on communicative
characteristics of the target language.
3) Analysis and Use

The holistic vs. discrete dichotomy appears in the domain of product/out-comes as the
fluctuation between courses which has emphasized analysis and those which emphasized use,
particularly when viewed historically or, as the concept has been personified recently (Rivers
1981), the dichotomy which exists between the views of ‘formalists’, those who stress
knowing the formal properties of language as proper outcome for learners in a language
course, and ‘activist’, those who stress using language actively.

B. 4. Reconciling Opposites in The Instructional Plans

Faced with the dilemma of integrating discrete elements or analyses of language

content with holistic, comprehensive use of it, various sequential plans have been proposed
for course designs:

1. A holistic approach is adopted with emphasis on thematic, meaningful interaction

which is self-motivating. In addition to holistic language experiences for the whole group,
there are workbooks for use by individuals which concentrate on grammatical points and
specific skills.

2. A more structural/notional approach is adopted in the syllabus with emphasis on the

skills that have been selected as most important for the course. To meet individual needs,
other materials are in use in a learning center or a language laboratory in which there is
emphasis on thematic and communicative use of language.

3. The early phase of the course is structural. Later, as learners progress in their basic
acquisition of grammatical competence, they move on to a more holistic approach, utilizing
global language in communicative workouts.

4. The course follows a thematic, communicative tone, similar to a language arts course
for native-speaker children. At a later stage, more attention is given to accuracy and form. In
this instance, Gestalt learning comes first and discrete-point elements are added later.

Which of these designs seems to be suitable will depend on the particular situation
and the group of students. However, writers who must plan for large numbers of learners, for
example people who write text book series, are faced with serious questions which, if they
are to be successfully answered, require a great deal of keen intuition, skill, plus a bit of luck
at balancing trends in the field with topical interests and outlooks which will appeal to a
maximally general audience.

B. 5. Other System, Other Worlds

Other suggestions have been made for utilization of language content based on
analyses that are less tied to discreteness since they draw on systemic characteristics. As
already mentioned, from the field of philosophy the communicative approach has
incorporated speech act theory, a way of looking at categories of language use which relies
more on complex relationships than on discrete elements.

From the field of ethno methodology have come significant insight into how users
employ language to carry out their everyday, mundane business. For example, ethno
methodology have described how people take turns in conversation, how they organize their
speaking in relation to each other, how they punctuate their talk through employing tactics for
signaling openings and closings, starting and breaking-off point (Schegloff 1968, Sacks
1972). The starting point for ethno methodology is not language, per se, but rather the
constructs of sociology: norms, values, roles, interest coalitions, and the like.

While grappling with the discrete point vs. holistic dilemma in our work as course
designers and materials writers, we recognize, too, that the questions has a much larger scope.
When we take a moment off to poke out heads outside our own cave, we note that the issue
shows up in many of the disciplines which western science pursues. From physics to biology
to geology, and in other related areas, the dilemma is a central theoretical issue of recent
time. Traditionally, western science has been largely influenced by a Cartesian view which
‘believed that complex phenomena could always be understood by reducing them to their
basic building blocks and by looking at the mechanism through which these interacted. This
attitude, known as reductionism, has become so deeply ingrained in our culture that it has
often been identified with the scientific method’ (Capra 1982:47).

Capra goes on to pint out that ‘in the twentieth century …. the universe is no longer
seen as a machine, made up of a multitude of separate objects, but appears as a harmonious
indivisible whole; a network of dynamic relationships that include the human observer and
his or her consciousness in an essential way.’ Such an approach to the study of human
language might provide course designers a framework which brings about a synthesis of
discrete and holistic views.

CHAPTER III

CONCLUSION
 Communicative language teaching has been the centre of language teaching
discussions since the late 1960s (Savignon & Berns, 1984, p.4). Over the years it had become
clear to its proponents that mastering grammatical forms and structures did not prepare the
learners well enough to use the language they are learning effectively when communicating
with others. As a result, situational language teaching and its theoretical conjectures were
questioned by British linguists. Some of the linguists had the task of providing the Council of
Europe with a standardized programme for foreign language teaching. D. A. Wilkins was one
of them, and his work has had the greatest impact on current materials for language teaching
(Savignon & Berns, 1984, p.10). He analysed the existing syllabus types (grammatical and
situational) and the communicative meanings that a language learner needs to understand.

In place of the existing syllabus Wilkins proposed a notional syllabus. This syllabus
was not organized in terms of grammatical structures but rather specified what meanings the
learners needed in order to communicate. What began as a development only in Britain has
expanded since the mid 1970’s. Now it is seen as an approach that pursues two main goals.

The first one is “to make communicative competence the goal of language teaching”
and the second one, “to develop procedures for the teaching of the four language skills that
acknowledge the interdependence of language and communication” (Richards & Rodgers,
2001, p.155).

CLT is interested in giving students the skills to be able to communicate under

various circumstances. As such, it places less emphasis on the learning of specific
grammatical rules and more on obtaining native-speaker-like fluency and pronunciation.
Students are assessed on their level of communicative competence rather than on their
explicit knowledge.

It is more of an approach or philosophy than a highly structured methodology. David

Nunan famously listed five key elements to the communicative approach:

1) An emphasis on learning to communicate through interaction in the target language.

2) The introduction of authentic texts into the learning situation.
3) The provision of opportunities for learners to focus, not only on the language but also
on the learning process itself.
4) An enhancement of the learner's own personal experiences as important contributing
elements to classroom learning.
5) An attempt to link classroom language learning with language activation outside the
classroom.

SOURCES
http://www.slideshare.net/.../focusing-on-language-content-in-a-communicative/
http://longlifeeducation-sukses.blogspot.com/.../scope-of-communicative-syllabus/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicative_language_teaching/