Principles

• A “method” approach to curriculum design

• All the various aspects of curriculum design have not been
systematically based on research and theory.
• A sensible basis to guide teaching and to help in the
design of courses rests on following principles (p.38-39)
The Twenty Principles
• based on a pedagogical
perspective, focusing on
curriculum design and teacher
training.
• supported by research and
theory in any of three fields:
second or foreign language
learning, first language
learning, and general
educational research and theory.
• None of the principles is unique
to language teaching
Content and Sequencing
1 Frequency: A language course should provide the best possible
coverage ofmlanguage in use through the inclusion of items that
occur frequently in the language, so that learners get the best return
for their learning effort.
• vocabulary frequency
• the frequency of grammatical structures
• English for Special Purposes needs analysis
• selection of material:
• A language course should give most attention to the high-
frequency items of the language.
• Low-frequency items should be dealt with only when
the high- frequency items have been sufficiently learned.
https://www.wordfrequency.info/free.asp?s=y
https://www.wordfrequency.info/free.asp?s=y
 If a course contains a mixture of high- and low-frequency items
that does not give the best available return for learning e ff ort, a
teacher may wish to do the following things:
1. Include all the high-frequency items which are at the
appropriate level for the learners. In a typical beginners’
course, for example, this would probably involve
including verb + to + stem.
2. Ignore or pass quickly over the low-frequency
items that have been included. If these items are likely
to be included in an external exam, quickly teach
appropriate ways of dealing with them in the
exams. These ways may simply involve the
memorisation of rules rather than trying to gain active
use of the low-frequency items.
3. Provide substantial amounts of practice of the
2 Strategies and autonomy: A language course should train learners in how
to learn a language and how to monitor and be aware of their learning, so
that they can become effective and independent language learners.
Learning strategies
• Deep processing of language and content
• vocabulary learning cards
• word part strategies
• mnemonic strategies, e.g. keyword
• predicting
• Note-taking strategies
• Gaining input
• peer interaction strategies
• strategies for controlling the teacher
• Coping strategies
• Inferring vocabulary from context
• Coping with complex sentences
Five principles for promoting learner autonomy that teachers
and curriculum designers should consider:

• learner goals
• the language learning process
• tasks
• learner strategies
• reflection on learning
3 Spaced retrieval: Learners should have increasingly spaced,
repeated opportunities to retrieve and give attention to wanted
items in a variety of contexts.

• Effects of repetition on learning

• The simplest and possibly the most useful way to check is to
test frequently whether wanted items are learned.
4 Language system: The language focus of a course needs to be on
the generalisable features of the language.

• “Does today’s work help the learners to deal with

tomorrow’s task?”
• The principle can be applied at all levels of language. The
following list indicates areas of focus:
• Vocabulary
• high-frequency vocabulary
• underlying meaning
• word parts
• Structure
• frequent structures
• Discourse
• topic type
rhetorical structure
5 Keep moving forward: A language course should progressively
cover useful language items, skills and strategies.
• The course should have explicit language teaching goals
and that there should be some way of ensuring that
there is opportunity for the goals to be reached.
• Make sure that each learning task has a goal which fits
with the plan for the course.
• If a course includes activities that do not have an obvious
learning goal or that have a goal that does not fit the
overall goals of the course, it is worth adapting or
replacing the task.
6 Teachability: The teaching of language items should take account
of the most favourable sequencing of these items and should take
account of when the learners are most ready to learn them.

Krashen’s
Natural Order
Hypothesis
7 Learning burden: The course should help learners make the most
effective use of previous knowledge.

• Much of the previous knowledge that is brought to second-

language learning comes from the learners’ first language.
• There is plenty of evidence however that aspects of the
first language can help learning. This help can occur at all
levels within the language, with pronunciation, grammar,
vocabulary and discourse. It can also occur with aspects of
language skill and with content knowledge.
• If cognate vocabulary is included in a course, learners can
make a lot of progress in a short time which is good for
motivation.
Solution to the sequencing problem
• let the occurrence of items in naturally occurring spoken
or written texts determine the order in which they occur in
the course.
• check the sequence of items in the course, particularly to
see that strongly related items are not presented together.
• let frequency of occurrence guide sequencing.
Format and Presentation
1 Motivation: As much as possible, the learners should be
interested and excited about learning the language and they should
come to value this learning.
• intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation
• Make the subject matter of the lessons relevant and interesting
to them. Surveys of wants and attitudes can help gather
information to guide this.
• Give the learners some control and decision-making over what
they do. A negotiated or partly negotiated syllabus (see Chapter
10) is one way to do this.
• Set tasks with clear outcomes and with a high possibility of the
learners completing them successfully.
• Set many short achievement tests to encourage the learners to work and to
show them that they can be successful learners.
• Show the learners how to keep records of their progress so that they can see
their continuing success. These records can include speed reading graphs,
standardised dictation scores, number of graded readers completed and
movement through the levels, scores on split-information tasks and writing-
accuracy graphs.
• Help the learners become autonomous learners (Crabbe, 1993;
• Cotterall, 2000) by explaining the rationale and goals of particular classroom
activities, by the teacher modelling autonomous behaviour and by learners
modelling autonomous behaviour for each other.
• Reward learners’ e ff orts through publication in a class newsletter,
through praise and through attention from the teacher.
• Use tasks that contain built-in challenges such as competition, time
pressure, memory and hidden puzzle-like solutions (Nation, 1989a).
• Encourage learners to set achievable and realistic individual goals (Boon,
2007).
2 Four strands: A course should include a roughly even balance of
meaning-focused input, language-focused learning, meaning-
focused output and fluency activities.
• relative amount of time given to the four main strands
• In the early stages of a language course about 30 per cent
of the time may be given to meaning-focused input, about
30 per cent to language-focused learning, about 20 per
cent to meaning- focused output and about 20 per cent to
fluency development.
• Some classroom activities or language contact outside the
classroom may not fi t into any of these four strands, for
example listening to foreign language television with
minimal comprehension. Such activities should not be
included in the time allocation.
3 Comprehensible input: There should be substantial quantities of
interesting comprehensible receptive activity in both listening and
reading.
• learners need to build up and are capable of building up an understanding of
the language system before they are called on to produce language (Nord,
1980).
• teachers can build up class sets through:
• Seeking funding from an embassy of an English-speaking country to
fi nance such a library.
• Getting each learner to buy one text each and then organise a system for
temporarily exchanging the books amongst the members of the class so
that each learner can read the books belonging to other learners in
the class.
• Building up a reading box of material taken from newspapers, written by
learners, written by a group of co-operating teachers, and put on cards or in
plastic bags.
• Placing a book in a glass-covered case. Each day turn one page so that the
learners can read more of the story each day.
4 Fluency: A language course should provide activities aimed at
increasing the fluency with which learners can use the language
they already know, both receptively and productively.

• Fluency is a part of the skill goal of language learning.

Fluency activities do not aim to teach new language items
but aim to give the learner ready access to what is already
known.
• A teacher can check to see if a course gives sufficient
attention to fluency by looking at the amount of time
given to fluency activities.
• If fluency activities are included in each lesson and make
use of new language items taught in that lesson, then these
items should occur at a low density in the fluency
material. In reading material this means that at least
“syllabus with holes in it” holes or gaps are times when
no new material is presented and there are fluency-directed
activities.
(Extensive reading for fluency development, rather than for
language growth (Hu and Nation, 2000))

A parallel syllabus “two separate strands, one

for ‘products’ and the other for tasks, each graded and
sequenced separately”.
5 Output: The learners should be pushed to produce the language
in both speaking and writing over a range of discourse types.

• While input is undoubtedly very important and should

precede output, there are strong arguments for making
sure that learners are given the chance to produce
language.
• Speaking and writing require the retrieval of form and the
development of productive skills.
• Courses which aim at all four skills can be checked to see
that about 25 per cent of the total learning time is given to
activities involving language production.
• It is also worthwhile checking that either writing or
speaking is not being neglected at the expense of the other.
• It is also worth checking that learners are having to
6 Deliberate learning: The course should include language-focused
learning on the sound system, spelling, vocabulary, grammar and
discourse areas.
• Courses containing appropriate amounts and types of
language-focused learning achieve better results than
courses which do not include such learning.
• Language-focused learning requires certain conditions to
be effective.
• The language features focused on must be reasonably
simple.
• The language features should not be influenced by
developmental sequences or, if they are, the learners
should be at the appropriate stage of development to benefit
from the attention.
 • The following activities are all examples of language-
focused learning:
• Dictation
• Listening for particular words or phrases
• Repetition and substitution drills
• Memorizing dialogues and poems
• Analysing cohesive devices
• Learning to guess from context clues
• Sentence-completion activities
• Sentence combining and transformation
• Guided composition
• Distinguishing
!!! Language-focused minimal
practice pairs
does not lead directly to the implicit knowledge of language
that is•needed for normal
Focusing communication.
on sounds, It is therefore
intonation very important in a language
and stress
course that language-focused learning is seen as a support rather than a substitute for
• Learning
learning vocabulary activities.
through meaning-focused on cards
• Parsing
7 Time on task: As much time as possible should be spent using
and focusing on the second language.
• how much will be learned is how long the learners spend on
appropriate learning activities. The more time learners spend
on language learning, the more they learn.
8 Depth of processing: Learners should process the items to be
learned as deeply and as thoughtfully as possible.
• The “levels of processing” hypothesis (Craik and
Lockhart, 1972) proposes that the single most important
factor in learning is the quality of mental activity in the
mind of the learners at the moment that learning takes
place.
• Items that are repeated without thoughtful attention will
not be learned as quickly or retained as long as those that
are related to past experience, result in some meaning-
directed e ff ort, or are thoughtfully analysed.
• “the quantity of learning depends on the quality of mental
activity at the moment of learning”.
9 Integrative motivation: A course should be presented so that the
learners have the most favourable attitudes to the language, to
users of the language, to the teacher’s skill in teaching the
language, and to their chance of success in learning the language.

• Some of the affective factors may be influenced by the teacher

and by the way the course is organised. For example, if the
learners are confident users of current technology but the
teacher does not make use of this technology, learners may
develop unfavourable attitudes to the course.
• Motivational teaching practice (p.63)
10 Learning style: There should be opportunity for learners to
work with the learning material in ways that most suit their
individual learning style.

• Not all learners will feel comfortable with the same way of
learning, and learners may learn more effectively if they
can choose a style of learning that most suits them.
• An effectively designed language course allows for these
individual differences and provides choices and flexibility
in the way activities can be done.
• The following list suggests some of the choices that could
be made available:
• group size: learning individually or with other learners
• speed and intensity: learning at a slow, thoughtful pace
or at a fast, intensive pace
• medium: learning through aural input or written input
• representation of information: learning through language
or through pictorial or diagrammatic representation
• mental process: learning holistically or through analysis
• understanding: learning through doing or through
understanding
• use of first language: learning through translation or through
the second language
• source of control: learning through activities planned and
provided by the teacher or through self-access and
Monitoring and Assessment

1 Ongoing needs and environment analysis: The selection, ordering,

presentation, and assessment of the material in a language course
should be based on a continuing careful consideration of the learners
and their needs, the teaching conditions, and the time and resources
available.

• environment analysis
• needs analysis
 2 Feedback: Learners should receive helpful feedback which will
allow them to improve the quality of their language use.
• What can a teacher do to check that there is sufficient feedback in a course?
• Do the learners have regular opportunities for careful language production?
• Do the learners have appropriate checklists or scales to monitor their written work? Has
the teacher set up a peer checking system to make sure that the scales are used?
• Does the teacher have a realistic list of aspects of language use that learners can be
encouraged to monitor?
• Do the learners regularly do information gap or opinion gap activities which encourage
peer negotiation?
• Do the learners wish to receive feedback about their language use from the teacher?
• Does the teacher make use of a process approach to writing and formal speaking?
• Is the teacher aware of the aspects of the writing and speaking processes where the
learners most need help?
• Does the teacher make regular use of an informative and acceptable marking system for
written work?
• Do learners understand the marking system and make use of the feedback?
Using the List of Principles
• It can be used to guide the design of language teaching
courses and lessons.
• It can be used to evaluate existing courses and lessons.
• It can be used to help teachers integrate and contextualise
information gained from keeping up with developments in
their field. For example, when reading articles from
journals such as TESOL Quarterly, Language Learning,
Applied Linguistics or RELC Journal, teachers can try to
decide what principle is being addressed by the article and
how the article helps in the application of a principle.
• It can provide a basis for teachers to use to reflect on their
practice and professional development. It may provide
a basis for action research within their classrooms. It
 • Case Study 1

• Ellis (2005) presents a list of ten principles which overlap

with the list of twenty mentioned in this chapter. Which
ones overlap? Write the number of the overlapping
principle from Table 4.1 next to the principle below.
Which of Ellis’s principles are not in Table 4.1? Here are
Ellis’s principles:

1. Instruction needs to ensure that learners develop both a

rich repertoire of formulaic expressions and a rule-based
competence.
2. Instruction needs to ensure that learners focus
predominantly on meaning.
3. Instruction needs to ensure that learners also focus on