Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

This type of syllabus is associated with the name of Prabhu and with a teaching experiment which took place in South India in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The experiment's central hypothesis is that ‘structure can best be learned when attention is focused on meaning.’ For Prabhu, two consequences follow. The first involves the abolition of any linguistic syllabus. If we truly wish, he argues, for ‘natural’ classroom communication, then we cannot impose on the teaching any syllabus which preselects what language items will be focused on. Or, put another way, if we structure teaching around a linguistic syllabus, then we shall not achieve natural communication in the classroom. Prabhu therefore replaces the linguistic syllabus by a procedural syllabus, or a syllabus of tasks. The content of lessons is planned in terms of what tasks or activities will occur, but no preselection of linguistic content occurs. The second consequence of the central hypothesis is largely to eschew formal teaching procedures, like drilling and error correction, where the result would be formfocus rather than message-focus. The circumstances under which these procedures would be permitted are where they occur naturally and incidentally, for example, if a learner actively seeks explanation of a language point. In the general avoidance of these procedures the teacher is expected to behave like the parent ... log in or subscribe to read full text