Free English Language Dissertations - New Headway Claims That Its Authoritative Integrated Syllabus, Motivating
New Headway claims that its authoritative integrated syllabus, motivating topics, and clearly focused tasks, combine with a real understanding of what works in the classroom.
The following essay will evaluate the usefulness of the New Headway Intermediate course with regards to its suitability in terms of the students’ needs and the teaching environment. In order to assess these criteria, we will firstly consider the course’s general usefulness as a teaching tool, before considering how it relates to a particular pedagogic context.
The usefulness of New Headway Intermediate as a teaching tool
Suitability of the syllabus
New Headway Intermediate initially appears to have a functional, as opposed to structural, syllabus. It is comprised of 12 units, each introducing a new theme from which certain functions can extracted, e.g. permission and obligation (Unit 4), making suggestions (Unit8), apologising (Unit12).
Upon closer inspection, however, it is evident that New Headway is a structurally based course, unfolding from less complex grammatical structures, such as the present simple (Unit2), before moving onto more difficult concepts, such as modals of possibility and probability (Unit9).
A structural syllabus is a more traditional approach to language teaching, using the internal structure of language as its starting point. Many teaching books based on this method tend to follow a similar sequence to New Headway, reserving more convoluted structures until the end of course when students will have a more substantial knowledge base. Thus, The strength of the structural syllabus is that it can account for all the forms of language and relate them to each other in a coherent and finite system.
Despite the logic of this system, it is essential that the true meaning and usefulness of the grammar is explained, not merely presented, and its communicative potential is fully exploited. Whereas a functional syllabus allows students to use what they have learned outside the classroom at a relatively early stageone limitation of the structural syllabus is the scant regard paid to meaning and especially to the communicative potential of what is being taught.
New Headway embraces both ideas, ostensibly following the traditional structural course, but actually including functional syllabus items within each unit. It is a comprehensive curriculum that aims to teach a range of self-expression for use in common or likely linguistic situations, e.g. arranging to meet friends (Unit 5).
Treatment and place of grammar
Ability to communicate effectively is probably not attained most quickly or efficiently through pure communication practice in the classroom not, at least, within the framework of a formal course of study.
At the beginning of each unit, grammar is introduced via a Test your grammar section this, along with the corresponding Language aims in the Teacher’s Book, clearly establishes the new unitary objectives.
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