Welcome everyone, I’m Antonio Domínguez, an student from Education Faculty of Ceuta, and this is English Teaching.

Well, in my third podcast I have to explain a lot of things so I’m going to try to summarize them as much as possible because I don’t want it to be very extensive. ? I’m going to start with Section 1, where I have to tell the difference between curriculum and syllabus. On the one hand, curriculum is the name given to any educational programme which includes the purpose and objectives, the planning and implementation of learning experiences and the evaluation. On the other hand, syllabus is a more restricted concept and focuses on the selection of the contents and the order in which they are to be taught.

In Section 3, I’m establishing the curricular stages we must consider, which are: Curriculum planning: It is concerned with national language policies and their aims to satisfy national and local educational needs. Determining aims: Which are the general and the specific objectives included in the schools’ curricular projects. Programme preparation: This involves the preparation and the development of teaching and learning units and the methodology and materials we are going to use. Classroom implementation: Which means put into practice all we said before, and it depends on the interpretation made by teachers of the official curriculum and students’ interests and motivations. Evaluation: In the evaluation side we analyze the curricular process and the results obtained.

In Section 4 and 5, I will do a distinction between product and process-oriented curriculum: Product-oriented curriculum: It is organized around education goals so the most important thing about it is to plan the objectives. Also, lessons are teacher-directed because teachers are conceived as models to be imitated. The student’s performance is measured by tests that provide information on the final product. Examples of product-oriented programmes are the structural-grammatical and the notional-functional syllabuses. Process-oriented curriculum: It concentrates on the learning tasks and activities that students perform. Furthermore, it focuses on the process of instruction, the development of skills and the levels of motivation, instead of focusing on the final product, unlike the product-oriented curriculum. Moreover, special attention is given to students’ feelings and emotions.

In Section 6: On the one hand I have to explain the Common European Framework for Languages, which describes the strategies that language learners have to acquire in order to develop language competences that allow them to communicate effectively in a big range of different situations. The Common European Framework for Languages establishes six levels of proficiency: A1, A2, B1, B2, C1 and C2. On the other hand, I have to make a list of key terms in Spanish legislation concerning FLT, which are: Instrument of communication, approach, communicative competences (which are grammatical, pragmatic, sociocultural, discourse and strategic competence), mother language as a resource, contextualization, learner-centred, meaningful, autonomous and cooperative learning, collaborative working habits, concepts, procedures and attitudes and cross-curricular activities.

In Section 8, I’m going to define the pluridimensional syllabus, which is a syllabus that includes several (sub)syllabuses needed due to the plurality of competences our learners have to improve in order to communicate properly. This pluridimensional syllabus includes syllabuses about grammar, lexical, phonetic, pragmatic, cross-curricular, attitudes, procedures and “learning to learn” syllabus. So, a pluridimensional syllabus focuses on four general areas: declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge, existencial competence and learning to learn (study skills). These components should be integrated as much as possible in each unit.

When it comes to lesson planning, we have to consider learners’ age, the topic, the duration and all the activities we are going to do to improve the competences we mentioned before: linguistic competence, discourse competence, oral and written communication competence, existencial competence, etc.

About Section 11, I’m going to give you some extra guidelines for the classroom implementation of the lesson plan: One of them is about the use of TICS, which I consider very important because we live in an age where technologies is one of the main instruments we use to communicate each other. Another guideline is about cooperative work, we need our students to be more collaborative, so I will do activities where they will have to help their classroom mates. Also, we can work with people whom mother language is English, for instance, doing skype interviews. Materials are important too, so we need to use a large range of resources like board games, films, music, books…

And that’s all, thanks for listening!