A Summary of Course Design (Chapter 4 and Chapter 5)

Dwi Sinta Amelia 2009060201 VII A University of Pamulang, Tangerang Selatan

At various times during their careers, professionals in the field of language teaching find themselves involved in tasks quite removed from actual classroom instruction. Among these non teaching assignments are the planning of courses and the writing of materials. In recent years many exciting developments in language teaching have become interesting subjects to be discussed among English specialists and English teachers among the world. Some have put forward idea of notional and functional syllabuses. Other are concerned with methodology, approach, procedure, and communicative language teaching. Wilkin (1972) wrote that there are two categories of meaning and use might be suitable for the purpose of syllabus design. The famous term semantic-grammatical deals with everyday speech concepts which focused on how people express the concept of frequency in English. The communication function, in board term, the uses to which we put language. These functions do not, unlike the semantic-grammatical categories, relate directly to grammatical categories. When people use language, of course they have to deal with knowledge of usage. Widdowson (1978:10) points out people who have learned a large number of sentence patterns and a large number of words which can fit into them sometimes do not know how they are actually put to communicative use.

Foreign Language teaching (FLT) and second language acquisition (SLA) are two subfields of applied linguistics that is quite different in historical and research terms. For a large part of its long history FLT relied mostly intuitive approaches of both theoriticians and practitioners. Nowadays, language teaching draws heavily on insights that are validated by the research into the teaching process in all its complexity. The content of language teaching (e.g. vocabulary and grammar), its aim (e.g. communicative competence), its protagonists (e.g. learner, teacher) as well as elements of the process itself (e.g. language learning and acquisition, classroom interaction) have each contributed to and benefited from a number of disciplines that focus, exclusively or in part, on this important human activity. Littlewood (1948:36-38) states that learners in acquiring a language deal with various aspects of the second language. The learners who live in the second language environment have been exposed to the language in a real life situation. Therefore, they have experienced in using the second language as communication. We can take a look in LEMIGAS situation, especially the needs of secretaries in LEMIGAS, it is necessary for them to use language for the purpose of communication. This need to speak English, particularly for business and travel has emerged advances in the speed of communication systems and mobility, which have spurred globalization and have lead to exponential growth of the use of English as lingua franca. When people talk about oral communication, obviously there are two people involved in it. The diagram below shows what happens in a speech situation, therefore, which is involved in oral ability (Byrne, new edition:10)
Speak Initiate Respond Listen

Oral Ability

The points discussed above are the essential factors two way communication. They deal with the speaking and listening process. In the relation to the secretaries needs in the oral skills as they should be fluent in English to play their roles. Most English teacher nowadays tries to establish language skills, for the purpose of communicative activity. All of these deal with the motivates for communication

(commenting on events, expressing moods and feelings, putting across points of view) as well as the socially ritualized politeness formulae of conversation, introductions and the like. Canale and Swain (1980) describe the element of communicative competence. They call it the four areas of knowledge and skill: 1) Grammatical competence; 2) Sociolinguistic competence; 3) Discourse competence, and 4) Strategic competence. In oral communication intelligibility is a very important consideration because if people have problems in producing English in term of producing sounds, content words in utterances, important words and important ideas, they wont be able to communicate effectively. For example the secretaries in LEMIGAS have some problems in pronunciation. Their difficulty in relation to words stress is caused because the Indonesian language is syllable timed, whereas, English is stress timed. Because of these mistakes, it is difficult for native speakers to understand what they say.