For this course, I designed a course, Rekhta: Conversational Urdu Language Learning Course without any suggested syllabus or prescribed book. Drawing on backward design (Wiggins & McTighe , 2005), I celebrated my freedom to design the course driven by the needs assessment of learners (Graves, 2000). At the time of this course, I was teaching Hindi/Urdu as a Fulbright foreign language teacher for the Self-study language program at Yamada Language center. Inspired by the experience of teaching my first language during the time of this course, I relied heavily on my on-going teaching experience. The enrollment audience of my course were heritage language learners who had unique needs to make their learning a self-directed process. Therefore, I started with need analysis (NA) that involved gathering data from learners and stakeholders. The proposed data collection process for NA included interview with the coordinator of the self-study language program and face-to-face group discussion with learners. Important thing to note in this needs analysis work is that it is not limited to only a one-time event but it is a continuous process of gathering and interpreting information to make some instructional decisions (Brown & Lee, 2015). For this reason, this needs analysis included long-term and short-term goals assignment, personal progress reports, and reflections in Week three and five.

Along the same lines of design, the lesson plans from the course LT 536, Design for Learning Language Systems, focus on the use of different instructional approaches and methods to emphasize the effectiveness of intentional language teaching. For example, the first lesson plan illustrates the use of task-based learning as a central component of Communicative Language Teaching (Ellis, 2003). Through scaffolding and interactive input such as pair work and peer assessment, students draft paragraphs on given topics. Completing specific writing tasks encourages the active role of students so that they use language to accomplish tasks rather than never-ending grammar instruction. (Brown & Lee, 2015).

The second lesson plan from the course LT 536 is an example of topic-based instructional design as a part of project-based learning (Beckett & Slater, 2005). The project involves students in writing tasks for creating a blogsite on different topics such as traveling and hospitality, destination, accommodation, restaurants and culinary, directions, tour package, and money. Through the tasks in this project, students exhibit their skills and knowledge of language. The project-based learning is another form of scaffolding that encourages deeper learning of learners by engaging them with materials in a way that they can explore in a self-directed way and integrate different skills together as they would do in real life.