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00:00:02

[Lindsay]
 

Thank you, everybody. Thank you also for coming. Thanks for joining me. I'm starting off our session today. We're doing a short session about, well, actually, this is about a word that I love in its plural form, syllabi. It's like one of those words that, those irregular plurals that, like, I can only think of the one example where it's like that, or it's syllabus, syllabi. So we're talking about the syllabus today, and our session is going, is looking at how modern syllabuses kind of came to be, like the syllabus that we follow in a course book, that is, how that kind of came to be, but also how, what the next steps of that syllabus might look like, and how teachers kind of work with syllabi. I keep wanting to say syllabuses. And so we're looking at, we're looking kind of at all of that, how that kind of works together, how different elements of a syllabus come together, how it is developed from over the past, let's say, 100 years into something that's quite an intricate piece, like a sort of delicate clock, but also the advantages of that, and then the disadvantages of that for teachers, and what things could look like going forward as, you know, as teachers are adapting course books. All of you had said, for example, that you, of course, you supplement, you do extra things from your course book, and we have a talk later on exactly about supplementing, but here we're going more big picture into, into syllabus development, and what teachers can do.
 

00:01:40
 

And so what I want to talk about first is, like, let's just zoom out and talk about what is a syllabus, like what is in it, and how do we decide what goes in it. Okay, I'm going to be drawing on some very old work here. Those of you who study to be an English teacher might recognise some of this from your master's days or your diploma days. We're going to recover very quickly some of that. But the first thing, I think, big picture that I like to think about a syllabus is, I love the metaphor that Scott Thornberry, writing in the A to Z of ELT, or giving a talk about that, said that the syllabus, in a way, is like a travel guide, or it's like a travel itinerary rather than a guide, yeah? And by that, what it means is, like, a travel itinerary tells you where you're going. So you're doing a trip, and there's the itinerary of your trip. It says where you're going, what you're going to do, and also when are we going to do it. So those three questions kind of shape what a travel itinerary is. And I think the syllabus for language teaching answers similar questions. Where are we going? What are we going to do?
 

00:02:51
 

When are we going to do it? But basically, those could get boiled down to what do we include, and in what order, yeah? And there are different considerations about this, about, like, what to include and in what order. When we're trying to decide what to include, you can kind of ask, like, how useful is it? So even if you as a teacher are supplementing or changing something out of the coursebook, maybe part of the decision is, I'm not including this, or I'm leaving this out because it's not that useful. So usefulness would be one aspect to judge. Another would be frequency. How frequent is it? The more frequent something is, the more likely it is to appear in a syllabus or earlier in the syllabus. And then once we've decided what we're including, we need to decide in what order. To help us decide that, we could say, how easy is it to learn? Yeah?
 

00:03:45
 

On the flip side, how easy is it to teach? So things that are easier to learn might come earlier in a syllabus. Things that are easier to teach also might come earlier. And how complex is it? The more complex the item, skill, text, grammar point, vocabulary, the later it will come in the syllabus. Yeah? So once we have those questions, we have the beginning of our justification of what order things go in the syllabus. One thing I often like to talk about with the teachers when I do teacher training courses is some of the dilemmas that come up for coursebook writers, like myself, or people designing syllabus syllabi. The kinds of things, the problems that you might come up with. Before we look at how teachers adapt it, let's look at the kind of things that those questions that we were just asking before, these questions, translate into dilemmas. Here's the first one. I'm going to ask you what you think here. Okay?
 

00:04:47
 

So corpus data, corpus data that is used to make decisions about a syllabus on how frequent something is, corpus data suggests that the present simple and past simple are by far the two most frequent tenses. So we're talking about a grammar element here. So if that's true, present simple and past simple are the most frequent tenses, should we move the past simple right up to be just after the present simple since frequency did one thing, or not? Or does something else happen between the present simple and the past simple before we get to that? That's a dilemma that's often been sort of like, yeah, I mean, for example, I'm seeing some people saying, I don't think so. It's also what you're used to. Usually, what do you teach after the present simple? For me, as a teacher of elementary students, I would feel very weird going from the present simple right to the past simple. So in this case, it's a case where even though it's more frequent, maybe it's easier to learn the present continuous. Or maybe it's easier to learn back in the day, have got. Or maybe the future.
 

00:05:59
 

Exactly. Like Nicholas Hogan has just said, the present continuous after present simple. And that's where the decision we are making is not about frequency, it's about useful, not about usefulness, maybe, or frequency, it's about how easy is it to teach something? Or how easy is it to learn something? Okay, that's one kind of dilemma. Yeah. Here's another kind of dilemma. So research into memory, and maybe my colleague here, who's going to be talking about memory, Carolina afterwards will touch on this or touch on other things. Some of the research onto memory that I'd read, suggests that learning words, as part of lexical sets, so learning like your colour words, or learning jobs, or learning sports is not always I should have put not always as effective as learning groups of words that are not necessarily connected semantically. Yeah. So these are some studies I think that they did, this was back in the 80s, where, like, you test people on how quickly they remember how much they remember things. And maybe sometimes the unrelated words could be remembered better if they were contextualised in the right way.
 

00:07:07
 

Whereas words that are very close in meaning, they get mixed up in your head, you're sort of like, oh, I'm mixing up the word for like this job and that job kind of thing. So if that's true, and again, maybe my colleague will later on correct me, maybe that research is no longer good. If that's true, should we not include lexical sets? That means you just teach random words in the syllabus and not do like your job words all together and your food words all together and the furniture all together. I think, for example, we should include lexical sets because students expect them and they're easier to teach. If I teach you, it feels easier to teach like house words than to do a text which has some house, some sports, some colours, some adjectives, and then expect you to remember those. And students I think want to try to group them even though it may be harder to remember them. So these are the kinds of dilemmas that come up when you're making a syllabus. Like when the research has one thing or the corpus data says one thing, but when what you're accustomed to says another thing, or what students are used to says another thing. Yeah. I mean, yes, you're right. Some people are talking about more interesting lexical sets.
 

00:08:16
 

That's true. But it's the idea of like sets or not sets, things if they're linked or not linked semantically. So I want to now talk about like, when, and again, I will get to at the, later on in my talk about like how teachers adapt the syllabus, but what kinds of syllabus do you have? And there've been often, there's been lots of work looking at the kind of syllabuses that we have. You have, for example, structural syllabi. These are based around grammar structures. And a lot of the syllabuses I think that you use or that I use are often structural. So like we do present simple, we do to be first and then present simple, etc. Another kind of syllabus would be semantic based around meanings or functions. Yeah. So the syllabus of like, we're going to do introductions first, and then we're going to do, introducing other people, talking about yourself, etc. Yeah. Finally, you could have a thematic syllabus, which is based around topics. So unit one, the syllabus is home, unit two is travel, unit three is whatever. So this is like a syllabi based on what to teach.
 

00:09:30
 

You could also organise the syllabus or change the syllabus around on how you teach it. A synthetic syllabus imagines that you build language step-by-step. So it's like we do present simple, and then we do the verb to be, and then we build on that by doing to be plus ing. And then we build on that by doing a present simple. And then we do present simple negative, and then we do whatever for grammar, or you build on like certain words, themes, and so on. So you build it up step-by-step. Or the analytic syllabus, you believe that you organise the language into chunks for communicative purposes. So we don't build up can plus verbs plus adverbial phrases or objects. We do like asking for permission, whatever. Yeah. Can I use the bathroom? Can I do this?
 

00:10:24
 

Or is it okay if I do that? So you teach chunks, as opposed to trying to build it up step-by-step. Finally, bear with me here, almost finish with the kind of syllabus, is what is the main focus? Yeah. Is the main focus a product, like we're building up towards them being able to do something at the end? You know, know this grammar, know this vocabulary, pass this exam? Or are we looking at a syllabus that the main thing is the process, that we focus on the journey, the choice, the order of tasks, and not focus so much on the end? Now, maybe you don't think about these questions that much, because you have a syllabus already made for you. But the minute you start like mixing around with the syllabus, these questions might be coming into your head. Or the minute you have a problem with a syllabus, or you're expected to change a syllabus in one way or another, these questions might come to the forefront. So the review of these, this is again based on David Noonan's seminal work on syllabus design in 1988. These are the kinds of syllabi that we have.
 

00:11:32
 

Okay, this is my theory part. Let's look at how we got to the intricate syllabus, because I think what we have today is a thing which mixes a lot of these. And the fact that it does that makes it very hard for the teacher later on to pull things apart, right? I want to show you a page from a famous, famous course book in the 1960s called First Things First. Has anyone heard of First Things First by Lloyd Alexander? It was a very famous coursebook from the 60s. So I want to show you the contents page. Here it is. This was the contents page for First Things First. That's our syllabus. Lessons 1 to 72. Lessons 73 to 144. Or at least they didn't put the syllabus on the contents page. So you had no way of knowing really what was in it. You had to kind of go through it. Let's compare it to now the book that I have just written with Macmillan, which I'm going to show just, I'm just, I've checked already that I'm allowed to show this. But here, look at, this will be familiar to all of you. Look at how the contents page, now we have our vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, reading.
 

00:12:38
 

But not only that, we also have the listening, speaking, vocational skills, writing. So the syllabus in the contents page has become incredibly, like, detailed. Yeah? Let's look at a sample page from that old book. What was going into the syllabus? Here we have it. Very old page. You're not really sure what to do. You kind of configure it out. You'd need the teacher's book because there's no instructions on the page. They give you an example to follow. It's very audio-lingual. Chris, the book is called First Things First. 1960s, 50s, something like that, Lloyd Alexander. And then compare it to a modern course book, like the one that I've been working on, where you have very clear instructions of what to do for the students. This is a speaking page where you see there's like models there. There's an output, an outcome. There's useful phrases. There's a little bit of that analytic syllabus stuff happening. The process is important, and so on. I always enjoyed this quote from the late Mario Vivalucchi, who once said the thing about, he was talking about syllabuses and what we put in syllabuses.
 

00:13:53
 

Language learning is an odd subject, he said. It's like, it's not even a subject at all, in the sense that the content subjects, like chemistry, history, and physics are. Like music, he said, language is a skill, a how. The problem has always been to fill the how with what. So, if we look at our syllabus, instead of thinking of the syllabus as that, he's looking at the syllabus more as a process than a product. And what do we put in
the syllabuses? And so, this is what we've got to with our intricate syllabus. I think originally, a lot of syllabuses, and they still do, have grammar. You then have vocabulary sets, vocabulary systems as well, like word formation, collocations, et cetera. We build then skills and sub-skills. We have our reading, writing, speaking, and listening sub-skills. We add into that later on phonology, so your sounds, stress, intonation. We add into that functions, like travel, English for travel, English for work. And then, to fill the how with what, we've gone even further, where now, more recent syllabi include vocational skills, or they include critical thinking as part of the syllabus, or there's a video syllabus, or there's social, emotional needs as a part of the syllabus, or we have a learning syllabus, a learning-to-learn syllabus, or there's a syllabus of authentic that includes authentic material from different sources, or a cultural aspect syllabuses. So, all of these things end up making a very intricate piece. And now, with the last sort of 10 minutes of the talk, this is a short talk, I did want to kind of zoom out big picture.
 

00:15:38
 

What is a teacher to do if you have this thing which has developed, the syllabus which has developed over and over again on iterations on courses over the last 100 years, from what we had in the sort of 40s, 50s, 60s, that were just grammar syllabus and maybe a vocabulary, to the functional, to adding this, adding the skills, then adding all that. How do we adapt it? I think there are different ways that teachers have done this. I think there are three ways that I see teachers doing this. The first is, you select the content. So, you adapt the course syllabus by selecting and deselecting different contents that there is in that. I'll talk about each of these in time. Another way, more recently, that teachers have experimented with their course syllabi is by using a flipped classroom methodology. I don't know if we even know if it's called that anymore. Ten years or eight years ago, it was like all the rage to talk about flipped methodology. Someone once told me, flipped methodology is like homework in reverse. But, needless to say, this is one way that was articulated, that was talked about on how you could adapt the syllabus.
 

00:16:52
 

We'll talk about how teachers sometimes do that methodology. And then the third way, harder, but maybe getting easier now, is replacing content. So, replacing one kind of content with another that would do the same purpose that was maybe more appropriate. Let's look at each of these in turn. So, first, selecting content. This is where the teacher would, like in any given unit, let's say you focus only on the grammar and vocabulary. So, I'm not going to do the reading. I'm just going to do the grammar and vocabulary because I don't have a lot of time. The reading is a big one. I'm not going to do that. Or, you omit the content. Now, one thing that I'm not sure if you're aware of, but you may notice, if you think about modern course books that you use, a lot of them historically have had their extra parts, what we called in the business gatekeeping.
 

00:17:47
 

So, they're gated off, which means they're like an extra page at the end of a unit, or maybe they're at the end of the book, or maybe they're sort of in an extra thing. So, that would mean that you don't feel really guilty if you leave that out. It's not like woven tightly in. So, omitting, for example, all the vocabulary in a unit, you sort of feel a bit like, you know, okay guys, don't do this exercise. Just skip over that. Whereas, like you don't do the last page of the unit. That's how, that's what I mean by gatekeep it, or gate it off. Yeah. So, sometimes teachers will just leave that out, and the course book has been written in a way where you can feel you could do that. Some teachers do it by omitting a unit entirely, like we're not going to do this unit because it's kind of got a review of lots of the other stuff. Well, we're going to do something else. I'll just not do that unit. Or you omit certain exercises, or omit certain content boxes. That's one way. The flipped methodology takes us a step further.
 

00:18:48
 

Instead of omitting it, you assign it for homework, or you assigned it to do before the class. So, traditionally, the flipped one, you assign the grammar or vocabulary focus for homework before. Yes, I've done this occasionally, where I say, read up the grammar before. Do the grammar exercises at the back of the book before the class. Read the thing, because we're going to focus more on the reading or the speaking. The
reading maybe gets assigned for homework before the class. So, for the next class, please read the reading on page x of the book. Do the activities. We'll start by correcting those, and then we'll do something else. This traditionally meant, the idea behind this methodology, was that you would focus more on the communicative aspects of the lesson. The stuff that they have to be there in person, or online, live, that you could spend more time on, and focus more attention on. Or, alternatively, you use that time to clarify doubts about the content. So, they do it at home, and then you clarify doubts. For me, the problem always with the problem that I have with homework. Like, they don't do it, or some of them don't do it.
 

00:19:59
 

So, if you have half the class that have done the stuff before, and your lesson kind of depends on them having done it, more than it depends on them doing the homework, then that sometimes leads to problems. The third option was replacing content. So, this means that you replace grammar or vocabulary exercises with your own exercises. You say, for example, don't do exercise one. I've got a better exercise. Around 10 years ago, this may have been that you had a photocopy. Yeah, I still remember having, like, you know, tonnes of extra photocopies back when I didn't feel, well, we didn't have the guilty feeling of using many photocopies in class. I don't do it ever now. But, you know, you would have, like, don't do that in the book. I've brought you in something different. Yeah, or maybe displaying a different activity, or doing a kahoot, or something like that, to replace the activities in the book. Another more tricky thing is to replace the text with your own text, or replace the extra material, like the extra reading, the extra video, with your own video.
 

00:21:02
 

So, like, you know, those authentic videos from, like, documentary shows, or things like that. Teachers bring in their own favourite video activities to do some authentic video instead of the stuff in the book. Or sometimes I've seen teachers combining material of one book with another, which can work, but I've also seen it where it doesn't work, where it kind of feels like you're building a Frankenstein of, like, different courses. But sometimes it can work. I would suspect that now, for teachers that are experimenting with AI, replacing the text with another text becomes a little bit more easy to do, but maybe not always. And one of the considerations that you have to do when you're complacing the content would be, is the level appropriate? This is where, even as a writer, when I've looked at AI, AI sometimes struggles with level of material. So, it's not easy, even if I say to the AI, write, replace this text about sports, about a text about sports that's suitable for Spanish learners, use A1 level language. I still end up writing so much more over it that I don't know if it saved me that much time.
 

00:22:16
 

The other consideration is, are you recycling some of the vocabulary from before, when you're replacing something? And is there an opportunity to recycle structures? Like, if you've done your present continuous before, can that be recycled some way into the text? And does it fit time-wise? Sometimes the replacement text might be, or the replacement video might be too long or too short, yeah? And how do you know what to cut from the original? So, one of the things that is very exciting about this course that I've been working on with Macmillan is an idea of tagging the content in the book, different colours, different symbols, to show what kind of content is serving what purpose. So that if you removed it out, you could swap it in with something else. So, in a way, what is beginning to happen is we're beginning to experiment with showing how, yes, you could remove this part of the content of a book, replace it with something else.
 

00:23:13
 

So, like, this is the must-have language content, or this is all the skills content, or this is all the content, like the whatever, the informational or cultural information content. So, helping the teacher, in a way, make those choices, especially for teachers at university courses who are often adapting the content because they have other considerations that they need to deal with from the university, from ministry guidelines, and so on. So, we're almost at the end here. I want to have two minutes left to take a question or two just to recap what we did and to share with you a tip. This may be the only thing you remember from my talk, but if it is the only thing, that's cool as well. There's a new feature on PowerPoint called a Zoom slide. If you
look on your PowerPoint under the menu Insert, it says Insert, Zoom, and it's nothing to do with Zoom, the video platform. A Zoom slide takes all your slides and makes one slide containing all the slides that you can go back and forth from, and I like to do it for review slides. Yeah, someone says, ooh, Zoom slide.
 

00:24:20
 

So, Nevis, this might be the thing you remember. So, I just made Insert, Zoom slide, and it shows all my slides here, and so that way, with students, I can say, so remember we talked about what is in a syllabus. We talked about the travel. It was like a travel itinerary, kinds of syllabus. I looked at different kinds there, what goes in. We compared a modern to an old syllabus, and then ways that teachers do their syllabus. By the way, the Zoom slide also means that you can click on a button and it goes right to that slide, a bit like the old Prezi. Yeah, so that's the Zoom slide, which I often use at the end of my talks, at the end of my classes, if I have time and have done a PowerPoint class where I just cover everything we've done. That brings me to the end of my session. Wow, 30 minutes flies by when we're having fun. Will, if there's any questions, I have a couple of minutes left. If there's anything you want to throw at me.
 

[Will]

Thank you so much, Lindsay. Absolutely wonderful talk. Thank you for putting it together.
 

00:25:21
 

Years and years in the making that talk, I think, isn't it? Well, yes, indeed, yes. I can smell your experience all over it. Thank you for putting it together. So, yes, we have. So, firstly, there's a question here about ESP. Oh, right, okay, yes. Do you think there's a particular syllabus that works particularly well with ESP?
 

[Lindsay]
 

It's funny, it's funny that question comes up, because David Noonan, in fact, in syllabus design, did follow up, I think, with stuff on ESP, where they were looking at, it's ESP, where they looked a lot at the kind of, well, this is where this kind of stuff goes very helpful. Yes, I think ESP went from looking at the, like the structural syllabus, ESP would often do like analytic syllabus or syllabi, right? So, your business English syllabus tended to be a little bit more ESP, like you're, sorry, analytically based, and maybe a bit more semantic, yeah?
 

[Will]
 

Okay.
 

[Lindsay]
 

Other like academic English ones could be also analytic or could be thematic as well, yeah?
 

00:26:30
 

[Will]
 

Got it, okay. Okay. Thanks, Lindsay. Sure. I think that's all we've got time for, actually. We're going to stop there. Okay. Thank you so much, because you're doing this another two more times as well today. In fact, now, if you like, there's an unrelated debate in the chat. Would you like to put your oar in?
 

[Lindsay]
 

Sure, sure.
 

[Will]
 

So, pronunciation teaching, explicit or implicitly?
 

[Lindsay]
 

Yeah, I'm not a huge, I'm not, I don't come hard down on the side on either one of these. I think both, I think implicit, like, I think it has to have some explicit stuff for some things, and there's a whole debate on, like, what to include in that explicitness. So, like, the ed endings, like, ed, d, or d, maybe have some of that, but not do every single vowel sound, just have that come up implicitly. Sorry, that's a bit on the fence, but that's what I'm going to stay with.
 

[Will]
 

I once read about the, something called the Lingua Franca Core. Have you heard of that?
 

[Lindsay]
 

Yes, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
 

00:27:27
 

[Will]
 

Wonderful, isn't it? So, it sort of helps you to, really, to determine if you are going to teach explicitly what you, perhaps.
 

[Lindsay]
 

It sort of, it posited what would be the most important things, and in fact, that example I gave of the ed and the t is not included in it. They said, usually, as long as you add this, as long as you're clear that it's a past tense ending, that would be enough.
 

[Will]
 

Right, right. Thank you so much, Lindsay. We'll see you, I'll see you in a few hours' time.
 

[Lindsay]
 

All right, thanks, and thank you, everybody, for coming. Great to talk to you. Enjoy the rest of your talks.