Browsing by Subject "Curriculum planning."

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Open Access
Classical humanist,reconstructionist and progressivist traits of the English language teaching curriculum at Mustafa Kemal University
(1998) Esmerligil, Meral Adlı
It is generally believed that no standard curriculum will do for all or even most schools and that any evolutionary curriculum must be shaped around the qualities of the participants. The current curriculum in the Department of English Language Teaching at Mustafa Kemal University does not seem to satisfy the needs of both the students and the teachers since it was adopted from Çukurova University when Mustafa Kemal University was founded in 1992. The most important problems faced in the implementation of the present curriculum can be listed as a lack of written statements of objectives, over emphasis on grammar courses which are given for three years in an education period of five years, and a lack of emphasis on practical everyday communication needs of students. This study focused on some traits of three different curriculum approaches, namely, classical humanist curriculum approach, reconstructionist curriculum approach, and progressivist curriculum approach , in the existing curriculum of the Department of English Language Teaching at Mustafa Kemal University. To collect data, a total of randomly selected fifty students were given a questionnaire and fifteen other randomly selected students were interviewed. Since there are only five teachers in the department, the entire staff and the Head of the Department were both given a questionnaire and interviewed. The results suggest that some traits of classical humanism are more strongly felt within the department when compared to the traits of reconstructionism and progressivism, and that the traits of progressivism and reconstructionism present themselves as both the objective and the subjective needs of the students. Hence, it could be suggested that an adherence to an extreme version of any one of the above-mentioned curriculum approaches would be counterproductive since it would seem sensible to accept that these curriculum approaches are all valid at different times for different purposes with different learners.
Open Access
An exploratory study of curricular change in an EFL context
(2007) Sezgin, Gülin
This study provided insights about the process of implementing curricular change in an EFL context by identifying the problems in an existing curriculum and needs of the students, setting goals based on those needs and problems, selecting an appropriate teaching tool, training the administrators and teachers on that tool and preparing students for the new teaching tool to be implemented into the curriculum, and piloting and evaluating the new tool. In addition, it explored teachers’ and students’ attitudes towards a new learning tool in a university EFL program and investigated the administrators’, teachers’ and students’ attitudes towards implementing that teaching tool into the curriculum at Afyon Kocatepe University School of Foreign Languages (AKU SFL). This study was conducted at AKU SFL, with the participation of 12 teachers (three of whom are also administrators) and one class of 25 students together with their teacher. Data were collected through questionnaires, interviews, learner diaries, classroom observation and journals. The findings of this study revealed that teachers, students, and administrators had positive attitudes towards the chosen teaching tool and its implementation in the curriculum at AKU SFL. In addition, all sets of participants indicated some potential constraints of using the new tool and proposed a variety of recommendations for possible improvements. Moreover, this study underlined some major aspects of a process of implementing curricular change in an EFL context. The importance of teacher training, preparing students for the new tool, and taking administrators, teachers, and students’ opinions into consideration in all of the steps of a curricular change was revealed. This study also provides a model for a curricular change process in similar institutions.