Syllabus design, my sole summer class this year for masters, gave me a lot of food for thought. In particular,  our answers to the following questions would determine the ways we designed our language lessons and teach our students:

What is your view of language?

What is your view of language learners?

What is your view of language learning and teaching?

What is your view of language? Language for me is primarily a means of communication and a way to convey meaning. Of the four aspects of communicative competence identified by Canale and Swain, the sociolinguistic part resonates with me the most. Language connects people, helps them build and maintain relationships, and promotes society’s existence.It reflects the culture, norms, and values of a particular group of people and enables them to be passed on to the next generation.

On a personal note, I’m not that big a fan of the whole structural-grammatical school of thought. Language is more than grammatical rules, or letters, pictographs or ideograms. It cannot be limited to the sounds represented by the International Phonetic Alphabet. Language by necessity often goes beyond words, and we often use it to try to express things that mere symbols cannot capture.

What is your view of language learners? They are not empty bank accounts or blank slates waiting to be filled with the “right” ideas from the teacher. They are active and involved members of the learning process. Language learners bring their own schema and world view into the language classroom. Most of the time, they already have rich concepts in place which can be tranferred from the mother tongue to the target language. They have a set of attitudes, opinions, and other personal factors that directly affect how they learn language. Language learners do better when exposed to authentic and meaningful materials.

What is your view of language learning and teaching? Its a dynamic, confusing, rewarding, rich, varied, entertaining, frustrating, amusing, fulfilling, etc etc process. That’s both from a theoretical and an actual point of view.

As of now, I still consider my self a student and not a practitioner of language education. I’ve barely dipped my toe into the water professionally. That is why I am excited for several opportunities coming my way:

• Teaching English for professionals.
• Taking up my last 3 academic subjects for MA.
• Developing an online learning methodology.
• Learning a new language.

God opens doors indeed.