The Course Design of ESP The Syllabus

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d. The Course Design of ESP

ESP is an approach to language teaching which aims to meet the needs of particular learners. This means that much of the works done by ESP teachers in practice is concerned with designing appropriate courses for various groups of learners. Designing a course is fundamentally a matter of asking questions in order to provide a reasoned basis for the subsequent processes of syllabus design, materials, writing, classroom teaching and evaluation Hutchinson Waters, 1987: 21. According to Rudyard Kipling cited in Hutchinson and Waters 1994: 21-22, there are several important things to know in designing an ESP program, and they can be outlined into some basic questions. 1 Why do the students need to learn? 2 What is going to be involved in the process? 3 Where is the learning to take place? What potential does the place provide? What limitations does it impose? 4 When is the learning to take place? How much time is available? How will it be distributed? 5 What do the students need to learn? What aspects of language will be needed and how will they be described? What level of proficiency must be achieved? What topics areas will need to be recovered? 6 How will the learning be achieved? What learning theory will underlie the course? What kind of methodology will be employed? All of these can be considered under three main headings: Language Descriptions, Theories of learning, and Need Analysis , which can be represented in the relationship like in the figure 1. 12 Figure 1: The Relationship between three factors Affecting ESP Course Design

e. The Syllabus

According to Hutchinson and Waters, a syllabus is a document, which says will or at least what should be learnt 1987: 80. It means that a syllabus is needed in teaching learning activities. There are four types of English Language Teaching ELT syllabus, based on Robinson 1991: 34-35 which can be applied for ESP. They can be described as follows: 1 Content-based Syllabus This syllabus concerns to the product of learning. There are two kinds of content-based syllabus, namely language-form syllabus and national-function syllabus. Language-form syllabus consists of an ordered set of language items which are typically graded by supposed difficulty of learning. This syllabus has had the longest history in ESP and has also very important in ESP. WHAT? Language Descriptions ESP Course HOW? Learning Theories Nature of Particular target and learning WHO? WHY? WHERE? WHEN? Needs Analysis 13 Notional-functional syllabus consists of notion and function. The example of notion is time and space and the example of function is greeting and asking information. 2 Situational Syllabus This syllabus can be found in English for business purposes in some English for technology courses and English for social orientation component of EAP courses. There is only one kind of situational syllabus, namely topic-based syllabus. 3 Skill-based Syllabus This syllabus focuses on the development exclusively or principally on one of the four traditional language skills. The two kinds of skill-based syllabus are language-skill syllabus and learning-skill syllabus. Language-skill syllabus refers to the development of the four language skills are productive speaking and writing and receptive listening and reading. Learning-skill syllabus focuses on the development of language skill and the constituent of two skills namely macro skills and micro skills. 4 Method-based Syllabus Method based syllabus consists of two kinds. They are process syllabus and task syllabus. Process syllabus focuses to the process of method of language leaning. The key characteristic of this syllabus is what happens in the classroom is a matter for negotiation between the students and the teacher. The reason is to create the condition in which the students learn best. 14 Task syllabus consists of a set of task ordered according to cognitive difficulty. The performance of the task and attention in the class is consciously directed to language if this is necessary for completion of task. From all the syllabuses discussed above, the writer finds that notional- functional is the most suitable syllabus to be applied in the design program.

f. Syllabus in ESP