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‘A consistent and sensible policy’
Teaching is the art of the possible. However up-to-date or
valuable the ideas of anyone in the department may be, they
will be valueless if they alienate either staff or students. If the
department is seen as an organisation which achieves the most
efficient possible deployment of facilities, people and ideas,
then all members of the department must be in a position to
understand what the basis of discussion and innovation is.
This suggests that part of the work of a department consists of
clarifying its concept of why and how it is teaching English.
Such a discussion should not take place in a vacuum, however,
and nor should it be separated from the fundamental work—
that of teaching. There are certain key documents which every
institution should provide for itself, which can be used as a
basis for more general discussion. Every teacher, for example,
should possess a syllabus or a scheme of work for the whole
institution which will show how his own work fits in with that
of classes below, above and parallel to those which he teaches,
and if possible how the work in English relates to work in
other subjects, particularly other languages which are taught.
Such a scheme of work should specify briefly in the
introduction the role of English in the country, and the basic
needs which it may have to serve. These may be related to
education, business, tourism, for example, and they may be
expressed through emphases predominantly on speaking, or
on listening, or on reading and writing, or on any combination
of these. It should be pointed out which of these needs are for
use within the school, which for concurrent use outside the
school, and which are simply predictions of probable needs of
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students after leaving school. All this can be done simply,
briefly and straightforwardly, leaving the rest of the scheme
for a summary of the stages of work within the school.
The organisation of this scheme may take a number of
forms. Sometimes there will be units allocated by time, so
that each week’s work is fully described. Sometimes the
scheme will be no more than a checklist of items to be taught,
in more or less any order. Sometimes it will be a kind of
ladder giving a sequence of stages to be mastered, without
any specific time recommendation. Similarly, there are a
number of ways in which the scheme may describe the topics
to be taught—for example in relation to structures,
situations, items of vocabulary or notions. It is impossible for
a scheme to specify everything which will be taught, so a
selection needs to be made. But a syllabus needs to be
cumulative, so that the order needs to be established on the
basis of some sort of appropriate criterion. A department
may decide that the order should be on the basis of what sort
of language interactions are likely to be needed most quickly
by the students, or what structures are most accessible, or
what structures in a remedial situation have been observed to
cause difficulty most frequently. Decisions of this kind will
determine the ordering of the elements of the scheme, as well
as what elements to include. At the same time the school
which uses a syllabus which is basically structural may well
also require a checklist of extra structures to be drilled if
necessary, but which are not important enough to be in the
core scheme, or it may wish to have a checklist of situations
or notions which should be covered at some stage in the
programme, but which will not fit neatly into an ordered,
basic pattern. So in practice, the scheme will probably consist
of a core of work which is ordered, together with a checklist
of other items, which may or may not be optional.
It will be noticed that very little has been said about
timing. This is because the dangers of a carefully timed
scheme of work probably outweigh the advantages in any
but the short-course situation. In general, as thorough a
coverage of any one stage of the scheme as is compatible with
student boredom is desirable (assuming that the group
continues to find difficulty with the work). The ideal scheme
of work would provide an ordering sequence, but would
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leave it to the individual teacher to determine when the
students should advance to the next stage. It is not possible
(especially in the remedial situation of all post-beginners’
work) to predict exactly how long is appropriate for any one
section of the syllabus. What is absolutely essential is that a
clear record should be obtainable of what each student has
covered, with a fair degree of certainty that to have covered
the work means that it has been well assimilated, either for
active or receptive use, according to the requirements of the
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