VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST GRADUATE STUDIES
********************* THÁI THỊ MAI LIÊN DESIGNING AN ENGLISH SYLLABUS FOR THE THIRD
YEAR STUDENTS AT FLD, NGHE AN TEACHER
TRAINING COLLEGE

(Thiết kế chương trình môn Văn học Anh cho sinh viên năm thứ ba Khoa
Ngoại ngữ trường CĐSP Nghệ An.) M.A Minor Program Thesis Field: English Teaching Methodology
Code: 601410
Hanoi, 2010
VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

Declaration i
Acknowledgements ii
Abstract iii
List of figures and tables iv
Table of content v
PART A: INTRODUCTION 1
1. Rationale for the topic 1
2. Aims and objectives 3
3. Scope of research 3
4. Significance of the study 3
5. Methodology 4
PART B: DEVELOPMENT 5
CHAPTER 1: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 5
1.1. Definition of Literature 5
1.1.1. Literature and language teaching 5
1.1.2. Poetry and language learning 6
1.1.3. Prose and language learning 6
1.1.4. Drama and language learning 7
1.2. Curriculum and syllabus 8
1.3. Syllabus design 9
1.3.1. Needs analysis 10
1.3.2. Content specification 11
1.3.3. Syllabus Organization 12
1.4. Types of Syllabus 12
1.4.1. A structural (formal) syllabus 13
1.4.2. A situational syllabus 13
1.4.3. A notional/functional syllabus 14
1.4.4. A skill-based syllabus 15
1.4.5. A task-based syllabus 15 iv
LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLE

Table 2.1: The uses of English Literature
Table 2.2: Important items that English Literature subject support to students’ study
Table 2.3: People who decided the contents of the syllabus
Table 2.4: People who should decide the contents of the syllabus
Table 2.5: The order of syllabus contents
Table 2.6: Old or Modern English Literature
Table 2.7: The most favorite of students’ studying
Table 2.8: The order of the contents to be taught
Table 2.9: The activities carried in the past
Table 2.10: The activities should be carried during the course
Table 2.11: The ways students should be assessed 1
PART A: INTRODUCTION
1. Rationale for the topic
Together with the recent political and economic development, English has become a means to
help strengthen the understanding and promote communication between countries. English has
been taught and emphasized greatly in grammatical rules, phonetics and vocabulary in
Vietnam. Consequently, Vietnamese learners of English, despite their perfect grammar often
fail to understand English speakers who come from a culture different from their own. This

2
subject where as the college students have just one term for the subject). Hence, the teachers
of this subject at all the colleges in Vietnam have to decide themselves what and how to teach
their students. That the teaching is completely left to individual teachers leads to the fact that
the teachers teach what ever they consider necessary or capable in terms of convenience and
the availability of materials.

Being one of the teachers of the subject, seeing the burning situation, the thought of doing
something to improve this situation has risen in the mind of the author of this study. In present
time to do some changes to the fixed curriculum seems to be impossible. The only one thing
that a teacher could do is to develop syllabus based on students’ needs in order to give
students a chance to understand the history development of English Literature and approach to
a special kind of text: novels, poems, and plays which they are really interested in. There is
also a hope that the learners can be more confident in using English to express their
understandings of their own country literature.

From all the reasons given above, the author of this paper is strongly believed that if the minor
thesis “Designing an English Literature Syllabus for the 3
rd
year students at Nghe An Teacher
Training College” is completed, the situation will be improved, the teaching and learning
English Literature subject at Nghe An Teacher Training College will be more effective to both
teachers and learners. The author of the research expects that the study would be a necessity
and of great significance to the teachers of the subject who have been at sea for a long time
working out how to make the teaching and studying of English Literature subject clearer, more
interesting and more effective.
3
4
Since the study attempts to analyze the students’ need and teachers’ opinions in finding out
what should be presented in English Literature syllabus for the last year students at the
college, a survey has been conducted. Descriptive and analytical methodology is applied to
analyze the collected data from the questionnaires and the interviews. Because the number of
second year students in the department is not big, thus a decision of taking all of them as
sample for the study is a probability within the researcher’s time.

Questionnaires have been employed to the second year students and the students who have
completed the course at FLD. The survey elicits the second year students’ expectation from
the subject in their last year and it also seeks for the situation and the experiences of ex-
students of the teaching and learning English Literature at Nghe An Teacher Training College.
In addition, interviews have been carried out to teachers in the FLD to get help and opinions
from them in the field. 5
PART B: DEVELOPMENT
CHAPTER 1: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
1.1. Definition of Literature
There are many definitions on Literature from unscientific to scientific view points. Oxford
Advanced Learner’s Dictionary 7
th
edition defines Literature as “pieces of writing that are
valued as works of art, especially novels, plays and poems.” Lazar (1993) introduces
Literature as “feelings and thoughts in black and white”, “the use of language to evoke a
personal response in the reader or listener”, and “means to meet a lot of people, to know other
different points of view, ideas, thoughts, minds to know ourselves better”. Selden (1989)

teaching, brings about the kind of participation that almost no other text can produce”. Poetry
often uses particular forms and conventions to suggest alternative meanings in the words, or to
evoke emotional or sensual responses. Devices such as assonance, alliteration, rhythm, and
rhyme are sometimes used to achieve musical or incantatory effects. The use of ambiguity,
symbolism, irony, and other stylistic elements of poetic diction often leaves a poem open to
multiple interpretation. That provides learners of the language different ways to interpret the
language in a wider range of understanding. That is the reason why Poetry has sometime been
defined as a fundamental creative act using language.

When learning a language through poems, by reading, analyzing, and interpreting them,
students’ strong feelings and emotion could be awakened and positive reactions to what they
are dealing with would be aroused. According to Nilsen (2004) “poetry can contribute so
much to making any language class enjoyable, but it has even more to offer the ESL
classroom in terms of poetry – centered language activities”. “The whole poem or story says
something that none of its words say or can say”. Through poetry, students can enter a
different world of meanings behind the words themselves. They would know more how to use
the words with feelings, emotions, thus their communication should be more colourful and
attractive to the speakers of the language.
1.1.3. Prose and language learning
Prose is the most typical form of language; we can see prose all around us in the figure of
newspapers, magazines, films, literature and many other forms of communication. Prose is
considered one of the two major literary structures. Prose lacks the more formal metrical
structure of verse that is almost always found in poetry. Prose comprises full grammatical
sentences, which then constitutes paragraphs and overlook aesthetic appeal. Prose helps to
develop vocabulary and cultural knowledge as well as greater proficiency in critical reading
and creative writing skills. Further more, the language used in different forms of prose is the 7
most reflective of ordinary and conversational speech. Reading poetry provides students a

content, implementation and evaluation of an educational system. In its restricted sense,
curriculum refers to a course of study or the content of a particular course or program. It is in
this narrower sense of curriculum that the term “syllabus” is employed. According to Stern,
“syllabus design” is just one phase in a system of interrelated curriculum development
activities.

Through his survey of literature on second language syllabus development, Shaw’s (1975)
sees that “ the curriculum includes the goals, objectives, content, processes, resources, and
means of evaluation of all the learning experiences planned for pupils both in and out of the
school and community, through classroom instruction and related programs”. He then defines
“syllabus” as “a statement of the plan for any part of the curriculum, excluding the element of
curriculum evaluation itself.”

Syllabus is also defined as “partly an administrative instrument, partly a day-to-day guide to
the teacher, partly a statement of what is to be taught and how, sometimes partly a statement
of an approach.” (Strevens.1977). He adds “The syllabus embodies that part of the language
which is to be taught, broken down into items, or otherwise processed for teaching purposes.”

According to Wilkins (1981), syllabuses mean “specifications of the content of language
teaching which have been submitted to some degree of structuring or ordering with the aim of
making teaching and learning a more effective process.” Mackey (1980) adds that besides
specifying the content of learning, a syllabus provides a rationale of how that content should
be selected and ordered. Basically, a syllabus can be seen as “a plan of what is to be achieved
through our teaching and our students’ learning” while its function is “to specify what is to be
taught and in what order” (Prabhu, 1984).
9
Yalden (1983) states that a syllabus should be a specification of content based on the learners’
10

According to Munby (1984), syllabus design is seen as “a matter of specifying the content that
needs to be taught and then organizing it into a teaching syllabus of appropriate learning
units.”

From the above explanations on syllabus design, it can be concluded that syllabus design
involves a logical sequence of three main stages, that is, i) needs analysis, ii) content
specification, and iii) syllabus organization. This follows very closely the general model
advocated by Taba (1962) which gave the following steps:
 needs analysis
 formulation of objectives
 selection of content
 organization of content
 selection of learning activities
 organization of learning activities
 decisions about what needs evaluating and how to evaluate.

Three main stages have been identified in the process of designing a language syllabus,
namely needs analysis, content specification and syllabus organization.
1.3.1. Needs analysis
According to Nunan (2001), the reason for conducting need analysis is to provide the input
which is relevant to the needs of given learners that “need analysis is a set of procedures for
specifying the parameters of a course of study”. There are two different types of need analysis:
learner analysis and task analysis. Learner analysis is based on information about learners. The
central question of concern to the syllabus designer is: “For what purpose or purposes us the
learner learning?”. Except this main question, there are many other subsidiary questions from
which the syllabus designer can collect a wide range of information about the learner. The

for example, particular structures, sets of functions, or a range of communicative events. The
selection of content and objectives is “something which is shaped and refined during the initial
stages of a learning arrangement rather than being completely pre-determined” (Nunan, 2001).
1.3.3. Syllabus Organization
The objective of organizing a syllabus should be to promote learning, and not just to provide a
description of the language. Therefore, the content matter should be organized in such a way
so as to facilitate teaching and learning. The unit of organization should also suit the particular
purpose of learning. 12

The syllabus may be structured on the basis of a gradual move from the more general to the
more particular, a statement of a general rule to a statement of particular rules or exceptions
which incorporates the deductive process. The material can also be organized so that the
direction is from the particular to the general which is the inductive process.

If language is viewed as learned, then the logic of grammar rules imposes a sequence. If
language is viewed as acquired, then there is no linguistic content restriction. If a syllabus is
based on language use, a needs analysis would be required. The identified needs would impose
the choice of syllabus content. The organization of content is complex as it has formal and
functional components.
1.4. Types of Syllabus
Almost all actual language teaching syllabi are combinations of the types defined here. For a
given course, one type of syllabus usually dominates, while other types of content may be
combined with it. Furthermore, the types of syllabi are not entirely distinct from each other.
For example, the distinction between skill-based and task-based syllabi may be minimal. In
such cases, the distinguishing factor is often the way in which the instructional content is used
in the actual teaching procedure.
1.4.1. A structural (formal) syllabus

Examples of situations include: seeing the dentist, complaining to the landlord, buying a book
at the book store, meeting a new student, and so on. Therefore, situational syllabus is proved
to have some advantages, which structural syllabus lack. In implementing situational syllabus,
learners are given the situations in which they are likely to need the language (Wilkins, 1976).

Situational syllabus also has limitation. The most difficult problem the situational syllabus
designer may face when designing and implementing is what is meant by “situation”. Further
more, in some physical situations, language does not always have to be related to the situation.
For example, one person may go to a hospital, not to receive a treatment for him but to
complain about the garbage from the hospital destroying some plants in his garden. Making
complaint is not typical intention of one’s going to the hospital.
1.4.3. A notional-functional syllabus
The notional-functional syllabus represents a shift in focus from the formal to the
communicative properties of language; its central concern is with the teaching of meaning and
the communicative use of patterns.
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The notional-functional syllabus emerged from the notional one. It came into focus in the
early seventies and placed the semantic unit in the center of syllabus organization which is
organized around themes in relation to broad areas of meaning such as space, time, obligation,
etc (Wilkins, 1976). However, sometimes the concepts “function” and “notion” have been
confused. Nunan (2001) suggests that the designer of notional-functional syllabus ensures to
understand the distinction between functional and notions by listing the terms as follows:
 Functions: are the ones to be described as communicative purposes for which we
use language. (ie. Identifying, apologizing, enquiring, etc.)
 Notions: are conceptual meanings such as objects, entities, state of affairs and so
on. (ie. Time, equality, directions, existence, etc.)
It is suggested that in designing a notional-functional syllabus the linguistic content should be

other) skills in specific settings of language use. Task-based teaching differs from situation-
based teaching in that while situational teaching has the goal of teaching the specific language
content that occurs in the situation (a predefined product), task-based teaching has the goal of
teaching students to draw on resources to complete some piece of work (a process). The
students draw on a variety of language forms, functions, and skills, often in an individual and
unpredictable way, in completing the tasks. Tasks that can be used for language learning are,
generally, tasks that the learners actually have to perform in any case. Examples include:
applying for a job, talking with a social worker, getting housing information over the
telephone, and so on.
Task-based syllabus also has its drawback. It derives from Nunan (2001) that difficulty is the
key factor in determining the ordering of items in a task-based syllabus. All things being
equal, items are presented to learners according to their degree of difficulty. The problem for
the task-based syllabus designer is that a variety of factors will interact to determine task
difficulty. In addition, as some of these factors will be dependant on characteristics of the
learner, what is difficult for Learner A may not be difficult for Learner B.
1.4.6. A content-based syllabus
The primary purpose of instruction is to teach some content or information using the language
that the students are also learning. The students are simultaneously language students and
students of whatever content is being taught. The subject matter is primary, and language
learning occurs incidentally to the content learning. The content teaching is not organized
around the language teaching, but vice-versa. Content-based language teaching is concerned
with information, while task-based language teaching is concerned with communicative and
cognitive processes. An example of content-based language teaching is a science class taught
in the language the students need or want to learn, possibly with linguistic adjustment to make 16
the science more comprehensible. One of the great advantages of a content-based syllabus is
that it frees teacher from having to follow any one method of language instruction.


17
from the content being taught. In practice, many programs using a content-based approach
have also included on instructional component specifically focusing on the target language,
but such specific language instruction is not regarded as the primary contributor to target
language acquisition.

In conclusion, there are many types of syllabi, the six one presented above begin with the one
based most on structure, and ending with the one based most on language use. Each of the
above mentioned syllabi has its own strengths and weaknesses. That is why a harmonization
of different approaches should be taken into consideration. Selection of a particular syllabus
type or how to combine different types of syllabus into one should be based on a number of
factors, which relate to both features of the syllabus itself and the educational setting in which
it is to be used. 18
CHAPTER 2: DATA ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION
2.1. The questionnaires
The survey was conducted using a questionnaires adapted from Nunan (2001) “Sample needs
analysis survey form”. The questionnaire for graduated students aims to examine the situation
and the experiences of the teaching and learning English Literature at Nghe An Teacher
Training College. It consists of 13 questions divided into three parts: Objectives, Contents, and
Teaching methodology and assessment of the course. The questionnaire for the second year
students at the college is divided into the same three parts with 9 questions. The second
questionnaire seeks for the students’ expectations from English Literature course.

The first questionnaire was applied to 30 students who graduated from the FLD of the college
three years or more. All of them are now working as teachers of English at Lower Secondary
Schools in many districts in Nghe An province. The latter was delivered to 92 second year
English majored students at FLD in NATTC. They are going to take English Literature course

to know more about English
culture
6
20%
14
15,2%
3
to enrich knowledge of English
society
3
10%

13
14,1%
4
to further English Language
skills
3
10%
11
12%
5
to get acquaintance with
English Language
4
13,3%
12
13,0%
6
all of the above

Items
Graduated students
Second year students
Raw data
Percentage
Raw data
Percentage
1
Language
Competence
Grammar
7
23,3%
28
30,4%
Vocabulary
18
60,1 %
50
54%
Phonetics
5
16,6%
14
15,6%
2
Language
Skills
Listening
4

2.1.2. Contents of the course
2.1.2.1. Situations of teaching English Literature at the FLD
Question: Who decided the contents of the syllabus?
No.
Choices
Graduated students
Raw data
Percentage
1
Teacher
30
100%
2
Teacher and students
0
0%
Table 2.3: People who decided the contents of the syllabus
Question: What did the teacher let you know before the lesson?
Name of the lesson, handouts for reading at home one week before the lesson