A rationale for Skills-Oriented Procedural Syllabus
Nisar Chandulal Shaikh
nisar.shaikh@cihanuniversity.edu.iq
Abstract- There has been a continuous debate among the second language acquisition (SLA) researchers, pedagogues and teachers about the effectiveness of approaches to teaching English to the students of other languages. Now-a-days, this situation of English Language Teaching (ELT) is widely known as, English as a Second Language and English as a Foreign Language (ESL/EFL) context. The illustrious approaches to teaching English in these contexts are: The Structural Approach and Communicative Approach. The first focuses on teaching of grammar (system of language), and the other, teaching of meaning (language in use). After the setback to structural approach in the last 2 decades, communicative approach has got enormous popularity in the world of ELT. When this approach has been getting adopted for last 40 years till today, and worldwide syllabus designers, material writers and teachers have been using at a large, Prabhu, an applied linguist from India, investigated a new approach to English language teaching called, ‘Communicational Approach.’ He posited the difference between these two approaches as; the Communicative Approach emphasizes ‘teaching English for communication,’ whereas Communicational Approach on ‘teaching English through communication.’ Based on his approach, Prabhu developed ‘Procedural Syllabus,’ which consists of language tasks he used for teaching in many schools in South India. It was the pioneering work of Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT) in the world, and the second successful project after James Billow’s Madras English Language Teaching (MELT) project in South India. The present study is an attempt to gear the same approach with an extension of the skills element (hence, Skills-oriented Procedural Syllabus) and concentrates on activities which involve the four language skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing, focusing, that is, not on knowledge of the language, but on the use of that language in the classroom, the use that each student has to make of English, individually, every day.
Keywords- EFL/ESL, Structural approach, Communicative approach, Communicational approach, Constructivist approach,
Date: 18/12/2018ooo
Place: Departmnet of English