Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition
Download 0.82 Mb. Pdf ko'rish
|
teaching-english-as-a-foreign-language-routledge-education-books
- Bu sahifa navigatsiya:
- ‘A consistent and sensible policy’
General organisation
In the first instance, it will be the responsibility of the head of department to set up a satisfactory organisation, but it is most important that he should feel—as soon as possible— that he is entirely dispensable. The system that is set up should be sufficiently open for the department to be able to be carried on totally efficiently by the other members, even if the head is suddenly whisked off at ten minutes’ notice to another post or another country! However, particularly in institutions where there is no strong tradition of working as a team, the initial stages of building up a departmental feeling may require a lot of tact and a lot of careful planning and discussion. The two basic aims of departmental organisation are (i) to ensure a consistent and sensible policy in English teaching throughout the institution, and (ii) to keep the administration of the department running smoothly. The English Department 203 To achieve these aims a good head of department will ensure that all useful information is made rapidly and easily available to all staff teaching English and will also delegate responsibility wherever this will not impair efficiency (that is, most of the time), and will always be accessible to criticism, either of himself or of the system. Finally, he will never be contented, the department will be in a perpetual process of self-assessment and self-renewal, without losing the basic framework on which its continuity and efficiency rests. ‘A consistent and sensible policy’ Teaching is the art of the possible. However up-to-date or valuable the ideas of anyone in the department may be, they will be valueless if they alienate either staff or students. If the department is seen as an organisation which achieves the most efficient possible deployment of facilities, people and ideas, then all members of the department must be in a position to understand what the basis of discussion and innovation is. This suggests that part of the work of a department consists of clarifying its concept of why and how it is teaching English. Such a discussion should not take place in a vacuum, however, and nor should it be separated from the fundamental work— that of teaching. There are certain key documents which every institution should provide for itself, which can be used as a basis for more general discussion. Every teacher, for example, should possess a syllabus or a scheme of work for the whole institution which will show how his own work fits in with that of classes below, above and parallel to those which he teaches, and if possible how the work in English relates to work in other subjects, particularly other languages which are taught. Such a scheme of work should specify briefly in the introduction the role of English in the country, and the basic needs which it may have to serve. These may be related to education, business, tourism, for example, and they may be expressed through emphases predominantly on speaking, or on listening, or on reading and writing, or on any combination of these. It should be pointed out which of these needs are for use within the school, which for concurrent use outside the school, and which are simply predictions of probable needs of The English Department 204 students after leaving school. All this can be done simply, briefly and straightforwardly, leaving the rest of the scheme for a summary of the stages of work within the school. The organisation of this scheme may take a number of forms. Sometimes there will be units allocated by time, so that each week’s work is fully described. Sometimes the scheme will be no more than a checklist of items to be taught, in more or less any order. Sometimes it will be a kind of ladder giving a sequence of stages to be mastered, without any specific time recommendation. Similarly, there are a number of ways in which the scheme may describe the topics to be taught—for example in relation to structures, situations, items of vocabulary or notions. It is impossible for a scheme to specify everything which will be taught, so a selection needs to be made. But a syllabus needs to be cumulative, so that the order needs to be established on the basis of some sort of appropriate criterion. A department may decide that the order should be on the basis of what sort of language interactions are likely to be needed most quickly by the students, or what structures are most accessible, or what structures in a remedial situation have been observed to cause difficulty most frequently. Decisions of this kind will determine the ordering of the elements of the scheme, as well as what elements to include. At the same time the school which uses a syllabus which is basically structural may well also require a checklist of extra structures to be drilled if necessary, but which are not important enough to be in the core scheme, or it may wish to have a checklist of situations or notions which should be covered at some stage in the programme, but which will not fit neatly into an ordered, basic pattern. So in practice, the scheme will probably consist of a core of work which is ordered, together with a checklist of other items, which may or may not be optional. It will be noticed that very little has been said about timing. This is because the dangers of a carefully timed scheme of work probably outweigh the advantages in any but the short-course situation. In general, as thorough a coverage of any one stage of the scheme as is compatible with student boredom is desirable (assuming that the group continues to find difficulty with the work). The ideal scheme of work would provide an ordering sequence, but would The English Department 205 leave it to the individual teacher to determine when the students should advance to the next stage. It is not possible (especially in the remedial situation of all post-beginners’ work) to predict exactly how long is appropriate for any one section of the syllabus. What is absolutely essential is that a clear record should be obtainable of what each student has covered, with a fair degree of certainty that to have covered the work means that it has been well assimilated, either for active or receptive use, according to the requirements of the Download 0.82 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
Ma'lumotlar bazasi mualliflik huquqi bilan himoyalangan ©fayllar.org 2024
ma'muriyatiga murojaat qiling
ma'muriyatiga murojaat qiling