How not to design a syllabus

After many years of working in this business (and yes it is a business), I am still frequently frustrated by a lack of awareness of good practice when it comes to language programme design. Different institutions do it in different ways, but not that many (in my experience) do it well. In this post I’m going to describe a few popular approaches to syllabus design and tell you what’s wrong with them. In a subsequent post I’ll go on to give some alternative suggestions on what principles to adopt when designing or developing a curriculum for language learning.

Bad syllabus No. 1: The global coursebook

Coursebooks look amazing – they have great pictures, they appear to be well-organised, and they come with all sorts of add-ons – workbook, CD-Rom, DVD, website, references to dictionaries by the same publisher etc. However, I’ve said it before, I’m saying it now…