Process of Language Curriculum Development

Abstract

There are various frameworks for the process of curriculum development. According to Graves (1996), many frameworks have been proposed for the process of curriculum development and course design through which they are broken down into their components and sub-components. Such frameworks are useful since they provide an organized way in understanding a complex process; they provide domains of inquiry for teachers, through which each component brings up ideas and raises issues for the teacher to pursue; and finally they provide a set of terms currently in vogue about course development and thus a common professional jargon and provides access to the ideas of others. This paper is an effort to discuss the different models involved in language curriculum development when all of these models highly overlap with each other to some extent. One of these models has been proposed by Tabawho (1962, cited in Dubin and Olshtain, 1986) outlines the steps of a curriculum process which a course designer must follow to develop subject matter courses as: diagnosis of needs, formulation of objectives, selection of content, organization of content, selection of learning experiences, organization of learning experiences, determination of what to evaluate and the means to evaluate.