I’m an English language teacher. I teach Chinese young adults how to use English (or I try to, anyway). Sometimes, I secretly feel unqualified to be doing this, despite my years of experience and my bachelor’s degree in English linguistics. In this post, I work through my anxiety for the coming semester by planning for it.

Planning curricula and lessons

First, I have a lot of lessons to plan—about four hundred over the next nine months.Those four hundred lessons are split across two semesters and five different groups of students. Two of these groups share a decent textbook. Two of them need me to help them prepare for high-stakes testing (IELTS). The fifth group is the least well defined. It’s an elective, where I should teach the students something. I have some ideas, but at a month out, I feel I’m quite behind. I’m not sure where to begin.

I need to create five curricula. Because two of the student groups have an actual textbook, it shouldn’t be too hard to work with them. It’s the exam prep group that I’m worried about teaching. I’m worried because I’ve never taught exam-oriented English. My job could be made easier if I could find a textbook that would fit the students’ needs, but I’ve come up short in this area.

Luckily, I now have some experience planning a curriculum, after I faced a similar situation the school year before last. That time was different, though. It was only one curriculum, and it took me months of work. I did copious amounts of research. I must have read ten books on English language curriculum development. I filled an 80-page notebook with my notes on the subject, and having paid these dues, I'm in a little bit better situation to tackle the problem. But it’s big. And I feel like I’m floundering.

Tracking student progress

During school years when I have had a relatively light course load, I’ve taken advantage of the opportunity by learning more about curriculum development.

This year, I want to focus on assessment. I want to spend more time tracking my students’ progress. I want to do that because I believe it will help me better meet their needs. But the prerequisite for being able to spend more time on that is being organized with a clear plan of work in place. To help keep track of student progress, I have designed and adapted forms and other resources to streamline the process. The Time-Crunched Teacher on YouTube has created some videos I thought were helpful.

Needs analysis

Several authors on curriculum development talk about needs analysis as an important first step in planning a course. What are the needs of my students? The high school students have a variety of long-term and short-term needs. Short-term, they need to improve their speaking and writing skills so they can achieve good scores on IELTS to help them get into good universities abroad. That leads to the long-term goal. They need the academic language skills to help them succeed in a foreign academic environment. This need is shared by all of my students, but it’s most pressing for the high school groups.

Let me break down that short-term need.

Writing

I learned that in IELTS, students will be assessed on appropriateness, organization, and the accurate use of grammar and vocabulary, according to the publicly available rubrics (see writing and speaking).

The writing portion of the exam comes in two parts. In the first part, students need to describe some sort of chart, graph, or data. In the second part, students must respond to “a point of view, argument, or problem,” according to IELTS. The second part holds twice as much weight as the first.

This aligns with what I read in Eli Hinkel’s (2003) book on teaching ESL writing. He notes that some of the most common college writing assignments involve data, with cause-effect interpretation, classification, and comparison being the most common. For longer assignments, analysis and argumentation are the most common types of writing. And just like in IELTS, longer assignments tend to be a bigger part of a student’s grade.

Speaking

Speaking is assessed on a wide variety of criteria, many of which have some overlap with the writing criteria. They involve expressing and defending opinions, speaking at length on a given topic, and maintaining fluency with accurate, varied grammar and vocabulary use. Knowing my students, I believe that the focus should be on building fluency with a solid foundation of common vocabulary. Often, students have insufficient vocabulary or too much inert knowledge of the language that gets in the way of both fluency and accuracy.

I’ll need to look up more information about improving student fluency, although I suspect that vocabulary size is a major component of it…

Looking at vocabulary

Strengthening their core vocabulary knowledge will help my students with both their writing and speaking, so this will be a major component of the curriculum. I already know of some excellent corpus-based word lists that would help students build that foundation. One of them is the Essential Word List from Dang & Webb (2016), which aims to establish a sort of must-learn vocab list for beginning language learners. Another is the Longman 3000, which is a frequency list published by Longman Dictionary. Yet another one is the Kelly word list (Kilgarriff et al., 2014). Finally, the Academic Vocabulary List (Gardner & Davies, 2014) is worth mentioning for covering the important vocabulary specific to general academic English, but I’ll save these words for higher-level students (maybe next year). The only downsides of these lists are the lack of Chinese translations or definitions, which limits their usefulness as reference material for elementary level students. As I mentioned in another recent post, I’m learning how to use the Python module Pandas for data analysis, so I might be able to use that to add definitions programmatically. I’ll look for a translation API to get the job done.

Next steps

I now have a basic understanding of the IELTS test format and I have some ideas for the critical areas to be planned. I need to review my old curriculum development notebook for more guidance on materials development. I also need to build or find a list of themes and topics around which to build units for each course. There’s no time to lose!

References

Here are the academic sources I referred to in this article (in APA format). For other sources, I have let hyperlinks suffice.

Dang, T. G. Y., & Webb, S. (2016). Making an essential word list for beginners. In I. S. P. Nation (Ed.), Making and using word lists for language learning and testing. John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/z.208

Gardner, D., & Davies, M. (2014). A new academic vocabulary list. Applied Linguistics, 35(3), 305–327. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amt015

Kilgarriff, A., Charalabopoulou, F., Gavrilidou, M., Johannessen, J. B., Khalil, S., Johansson Kokkinakis, S., Lew, R., Sharoff, S., Vadlapudi, R., & Volodina, E. (2014). Corpus-based vocabulary lists for language learners for nine languages. Language Resources and Evaluation, 48(1), 121–163. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-013-9251-2