Introduction

In describing language teaching approaches and methods in this book, we have focused on the classroom processes that constitute different instructional designs in language teaching and the theories and principles that they are based on. We have seen that approaches and methods reflect different assumptions about what is learned, how it is learned, and what the outcomes of learning are. In educational planning, issues related to the inputs to teaching, to teaching processes, and to the learning outputs that result are elements of the process of curriculum development. The term curriculum refers to the overall plan or design for a course and how the content for a course is transformed into a blueprint for teaching and learning which enables the desired learning outcomes to be achieved.

In this chapter, we will examine how the approaches and methods we have examined reflect different understandings of how the elements of a curriculum are related and the processes by which they are arrived at. We will consider three alternative strategies that are reflected in the approaches and methods we have described in this book. As we noted in Chapter 8, one strategy is to first make decisions about what to teach (input), then to determine how to teach it (process), and finally to assess what was learned (output). We refer to this as forward design. Another strategy is to start with teaching processes or methodology and to let these determine input and output. We refer to this as central design. A third strategy is to start with learning outcomes or output and work backward to determine issues of process and content. This is known as backward design (Wiggins and McTighe 2006).