Enseanza y Aprendizaje de la Lengua Extranjera para E.G.

B 3 y
Polimodal II
Modality: Semipresencial
Teacher: Gisela Snchez
Due Date: October 5th, 2013

ASSIGNMENT 2

Define pre-planning and planning in your own words.

Describe the different syllabus types and provide examples of each of
them
What are productive and receptive skills? Why are they called in that
way?
Describe in detail the bottom-up and top-down approaches. Give
examples for each of them

1-Pre-planning is the first starting point in which teachers combine or collect

ideas, teaching materials or other elements in a coherent whole so that
students can organize, learn, practice, research and use the language. Teachers
must consider the language level of the students, their educational and cultural
background, level of motivation, learning styles and knowledge of the context
of the syllabus.

Planning is the product of teachers thoughts, clear and organized ideas

about their classes and what they hope to achieve. When planning, teachers
need to know their aims for the lesson (the purpose of their teaching), what
they want their students to be able to do and what the syllabus expects them
to do. They have to consider which activities fit best for the particular group of
students; they also have to decide which language skills they wish their
students to develop. Without planning, a lesson can be chaotic, without clear
ideas of what to do or expect their students to do.

2- Syllabus Types

The Grammatical syllabus: It is a list of items sequenced in such a

way that students gradually acquire knowledge of grammatical
structures leading to an understanding of the grammatical system. Ex:
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Enseanza y Aprendizaje de la Lengua Extranjera para E.G.B 3 y
Polimodal II
Modality: Semipresencial
Teacher: Gisela Snchez
Due Date: October 5th, 2013

present continuous, countable and uncountable nouns, comparative

adjectives etc.
The Lexical syllabus: It is possible to organize a syllabus on the basis
of vocabulary and lexis to create a lexical syllabus. It can be complex
since there are so many facets to lexis. Such as vocabulary related to
topics (art, clothes, crime etc.), - issues of word formation, -connotation
of the use of metaphor, -word grammar trigger, -compound lexical
items,-connecting and linking words, - semi-fixed expression (Would you
like to? If I were you)
The Functional syllabus: In his book Motional Syllabus, David Wilkins
included categories of communicative function. These language
functions are events which do things such as inviting, requesting,
promising and offering, so a functional syllabus might look like this: 1-
Requesting, 2-Offering, 3-Inviting, 4-Agreeing and Disagreeing, etc. The
syllabus designer then chooses exponents for (ways of expressing) each
function. For example: for offering, she could choose from the following:

-Would you like me to?

-Do you want some help?
-Ill help if you want
But the syllabus designer can then run into problems of lexical and structural
grading.
The Situational syllabus: It offers the possibility of selecting and
sequencing different real life situation. Ex

1-At the supermarket

2-At the bank
When students have specific communicative needs, organizing teaching
material by the situations which students will need to operate in is attractive
but is less appropriate for students of general English
The Topic-based syllabus: Different topics e.g. the weather, sport,
survival, literature, music and so on. Topics provide a welcome
organizing principle in that they can be based on what students will be
interested in.
The task-based syllabus: It lists a series of tasks, may later list some
or all the language to be used in these tasks.
The multi-syllabus syllabus: A common solution to the competing
claims of the different syllabus types we have looked at is the multi-
syllabus. Instead of a program based exclusively on grammatical or
lexical categories, for example, the syllabus now shows any combination
of items for grammar, lexis, language function, situations, topics, tasks,
different language skill tasks and pronunciation issues.

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Enseanza y Aprendizaje de la Lengua Extranjera para E.G.B 3 y
Polimodal II
Modality: Semipresencial
Teacher: Gisela Snchez
Due Date: October 5th, 2013

3- Receptive and Productive:

Receptive Skill: It is a term used for reading and listening, skills where
meaning is extracted from the discourse They are called passive skills
because student do not have to make any production on their own.
Students have to read and listen for some general understanding, rather than
asking them to pick out details or get involved in a refined search of the text.
(Type 1 tasks).
Type 2 tasks are those where students look at the text in detail, may be for
specific information or for language points.
Productive skill: It is the term used for speaking and writing, skills
where students actually have to produce language themselves. They are
called active skills. A key factor in this skill is the way teachers organize
them and how they respond to the students work. There is a basic
methodological model which includes; the lead-in stage (where the
students are engaged with the topic), set the task (it explains exactly
what students are going to do), monitor the task (it helps students where
they are having difficulties), task feedback (Teachers may help their
students to see how well they have done their work). Finally, Teachers
may move on from the task with the task-related follow-up.

4- Bottom-up and Top-down approaches:

Bottom-up approach: The reader or listener focuses on such things as

individual words, phrases or cohesive devices and achieves
understanding by stringing these detailed elements together to build up
a whole. For example, in a listening activity, the teacher reads out a
number of sentences, and asks learners to write down how many words
there would be in the written form. Learners are asked to compare their
answers in pairs, before listening again to check. This will help them to
develop the skill of recognizing known words and identifying word
divisions in fast connected speech.

Top-down approach: The reader or listener gets a general view of the

reading or listening passage by absorbing the overall picture. This is
greatly helped schemata allow them to have appropriate expectations of
what they are going to come across. For example, in a listening activity,
students use their knowledge of context and co-text, they should either
be able to guess the meaning of the unknown word, or understand the
general idea without getting distracted by it. Other examples include
putting a series of pictures or sequence of events in order, listening to
conversations and identifying where they take place, reading information

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Enseanza y Aprendizaje de la Lengua Extranjera para E.G.B 3 y
Polimodal II
Modality: Semipresencial
Teacher: Gisela Snchez
Due Date: October 5th, 2013

about a topic then listening to find whether or not the same points are
mentioned, or inferring their relationship between people involved.