A New
Language Curriculum Development in Costa Rica
Will this new proposal be successful?
By Prof. Jonathan
Acuña Solano
Wednesday, August 26,
2015
Twitter: @jonacuso
Post
188
In July 2015 I attended a presentation
where several curricular developers from the Ministry of Education (MEP) in
Costa Rica presented the new language curriculum proposal for 2016. In spite of
the fact that the new ELT program is rather ambitious if compared to the one
that is currently in use, the puzzling question that remains floating in the
air and pirouetting in the attendees’ minds (well at least in mine) is, how can
this great and earnest program yield the CEF B2 mark they aspire?
Based on what we participants were
explained regarding the new program, no doubt, as suggested by Richards (2001), the curricular developers from MEP followed a
framework for their work. MEP developers must have considered the content for
the new program, the students’ needs, contextual factors inherent to our
teaching scenario, “the nature of aims and objectives” in the program, the
planning of syllabi for each level, material design techniques, and the program
efficacy (Richards,
2001) .
Additionally, as mentioned above, CEF standards and descriptors were also part
of the planning of the new ELT program for high school. But was all this
enough?
“How can good
teaching be provided in a program?” (Richards,
2001) .
How can MEP authorites guarantee that the new program can yield the expected
CEF level they pursue? As explained by Richard-Amato (2003) and pointed out by
Richards (2001), there are several language teaching methodologies that have
been in the learning scene for over a hundred years. But somehow newbies,
veteran instructors, as well as teachers with just a few years of working for
MEP continue to favor those ones that were popular during the 70s and 80s
though the Communicative Approach was born in the decade of the 70s. A
communication-oriented curriculum as the one proposed by MEP developers cannot
be functional as long as no agreement in CLT-oriented methodologies is agreed
by all teaching participants working for public high schools.
“In a
communicative methodology, content ceases to become some external control over
learning-teaching procedures” (Breen
& Candlin, 1979) .
The agreement over content taught in class becomes crucial negotiations between
“learners and learners, leaners and teachers, and learners and text” (Breen &
Candlin, 1979) .
If learning and acquisition are meant to happen in our public high school classrooms,
learning outcomes in course syllabi cannot be simply written on stone or overlooked by negligent instructors who are not
that compromised with the philosophy behind the creation of this new program
that really looks remarkable if compared to former ELT programs at MEP and
impressive by the CEF language mastery standard that is intended to accomplish.
If no CLT approches to language teaching are used, this program is going to be
as useless as the one we have due to the lack of commitment from many MEP
professionals.
To conclude,
long held assumptions to language teaching must change to go communicative. 1)
Vocabulary and grammar are not the basic units of language. For Richards
(2001), “the priority in planning was vocabulary and grammar and these were
seen as the main building blocks of language development.” The new MEP proposal
goes beyond this way of seeing language instruction much more connected to a
cognitive-code approach as explained by Richard-Amato (2003), and if teachers
do not understand this, no real change will take place in the new program. 2)
If new analyses were carried out, learners in our MEP programs do not have the
same exact needs. No doubt the fresh programs intend to cope with different
high school populations individually, and that needs to stay like that;
otherwise, the program will prove no good for CEF standards. 3) Student needs
cannot be simply identified as mere language needs. As Richards (2001)
suggests, instructors must teach learners how to solve their problems through
English; thus, the program will prove useful in the teaching of 21st
Century skills needed today in any kind of job students may hold in their
future.
References
Breen, M., & Candlin, C. (1979). Essentials of a Communicative
Curriculum. Applied Linguistics, 1(2), 90-112.
Richard-Amato, P. (2003). From Grammatical to Communicative
Approaches. In P. Richard-Amato, Making it Happen (pp. 15-28). White
Plains, NY: Pearson Education.
Richards, J. (2001). Curriculum Development in Language
Teaching. Cambridge, GB: Cambridge University Press.
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