What is curriculum?
Curriculum refers to the means and materials with which students will interact for the purpose of a given educational outcomes. An ESL curriculum, therefore, includes all the theoretical considerations, topical content, material, activities, strategies and modalities that enables non-English speaking students to achieve particular levels of proficiency in oral and written communication in English.
Curriculum design:
Academic Development Department of Linguatutor was tasked in designing comprehensive curricula for ESL training of its diverse age / stage client base. We started our task with dividing our client base into the following cohorts:
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Pre-schoolers
children from 3 to 5 years old
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Young students
children from 6 to 11 years old most of whom attend primary schools
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Teenagers
students from 12 to 17 years old most of ceremony attend junior and / or senior high school
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Adults
All clients who are 18+ years old
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Corporate clients
Corporate clients
We then selected the best available text books and complementary material as the basis of our chosen curriculum for that age group. In order to arrive at this choice, we followed the following steps:
We researched standards of English proficiency for ESL speakers for each age group according to the requirement set by either British or American educational authorities.
We did market research on the popular material available and frequently used by different language institutes or agencies.
We prepared a Comparative Matrix based on the content, order of presentation of new language point or knowledge, presentation of language points, accompanied skills, age appropriateness of material, overall design, visual appeal of the material and the complementary teacher's guide and other audio- visual accompaniments.
Based on our comparative matrix we selected the text book that had the highest number of positive attributes as our recommended text.
Following selection of the recommended text as the standard curriculum for particular age group, we designed or selected placement test so as to precisely place all candidates in appropriate levels of English language competency.
For each level of our program for each age group, we created a list of topics and language points that are taught as well as a list of communicative skills and demonstrable (measurable) English language proficiencies that would be the expected outcome of studying corresponding course material .
