Text Technology-Enhanced EFL Syllabus Design The Internet is believed to have much influence on foreign language syllabus design in the form that it may change the roles of the tea

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Technology-Enhanced EFL Syllabus Design

The Internet is believed to have much influence on foreign language syllabus design in the form that it may change the roles of the teacher as well as of the students insofar as some of the authority and power is transferred to the learners. First of all, it can be seen that the roles of the teacher as provider of information and the student as receptacle thereof have shifted radically. The students, through their self-access internet facilities, have access to huge amounts of information and, unlike the teacher, have more free time to explore it. With the Internet, learners will be more independent as active shapers of the knowledge they obtain and the information they process. This supports one of the ten principles on ESL critical pedagogy by Crookes and Lehner (1998), stating that “[T]he purpose of education is to develop critical thinking by presenting students’ situation to them as a problem so that they can perceive, reflect, and act on it” (p. 321). The Internet can be tremendously liberating for both teacher and students, and therefore significantly affects the syllabus of a course.

Second, in many cases students are IT (information technology) experts well ahead of their teachers, especially the senior ones. This entails the expanding responsibility that the teacher must have in encouraging students to think about what they are learning and why they are learning it. Also, students need to develop critical skills in order to use information fully and significantly, and teachers must be able to train them in these skills. Pennycook (2001) used the term critical literacy, proposing a new English curriculum in which students must develop not only knowledge of text content but also knowledge about texts and text genre.

Finally, the counseling role of the teacher is expanding as learners confront the need to make decisions about their learning. With the new role of language counseling, teachers must now expand the traditional guidance to incorporate a far greater number of tasks and a sequence in which they can be completed to best suit a student’s needs, in both cognitive and affective ways. In this view, “the teacher participates as a learner among learners” (Crookes & Lehner, 1998, p.321). In other words, language counseling involves teacher and student negotiating learning goals and paths.

In general, the Internet means very much to the learner-centred model because it is both a learning and a teaching tool. Laurillard (2008, p. 144) argued that technology is certainly part of the problem here, as it impacts increasingly on the conduct of education. It is new, ever-changing, expensive, difficult to master, complex to manage, wide-ranging in its potential, disruptive of existing systems. And although there is usually funding for the hardware and infrastructure, there has never been commensurate funding for staff development, training, content development and research so that teachers can appropriately incorporate internet-resources into their classroom syllabi.

Admittedly, there are some drawbacks and problems to consider when using the Internet in designing a syllabus. Anyway, it is clear if we are in favour of the argument that education must aim at teaching people to gather information from an extensive variety of sources, and to integrate what they have gathered into a coherent whole so that it becomes knowledge, then the Internet is a useful medium to achieve this aim. Therefore, language teachers ought to bear in mind the educational advantages and challenges of the Internet in order to regulate the teaching programmes to meet the learners’ needs.

NGUYEN, Long V. Technology-Enhanced EFL Syllabus Design and Materials Development. English Language Teaching, vol 1, n.2, December, 2008. www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/elt/article/view/465/475. Retrieved on August 29,2010.

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