Tuesday, November 05, 2019

Syllabus Design by David Nunan

(Book Review)

Started: October 23, 2019
Finished: October 31, 2019

Why I Read This Book
I read this book for professional development generally, and specifically for the Delta Module 3.
This book was frequently mentioned in Delta Module 3 reading lists. (Delta Module 3 is specifically focused on syllabus design).  And my school library had a copy of it, so I picked it up.

The other book frequently mentioned in Delta Module 3 reading lists which was in my school library was Designing Language Courses: A Guide for Teachers by Kathleen Graves.  I started reading Designing Language Courses around the same time, but I found that the style was a bit more discursive.  It was fairly pleasant to read, but not as information rich.  Since I was on a deadline with the Delta Module 3, I switched back to David Nunan.  Syllabus Design by David Nunan, at least in the initial chapters, was very heavy on the type of terminology necessary for Delta Module 3, so the time spent reading it was a lot easier to justify.  Furthermore in Kathleen Graves' book, she mentions Syllabus Design by David Nunan as the textbook she used to teach her class on syllabus design when she was still writing her own book.  So better to start with the original, I thought.  (Although I may later try to finish up Graves' books to see how she expands on Nunan's ideas.)

My History with the Author
I've never read anything by David Nunan cover to cover before (and so have never consequently reviewed him on this blog before).  But I've read parts of some of his books.  This essay on Bottom-Up and Top Down Listening for Elementary Learners required me to read part of his book Second Language Teaching & Learning, which I found very well-written and easy to read.

The Review
This book is part of the Language Teaching: A Scheme for Teacher Education series [LINK HERE].

I've previously reviewed one other book in this series: Speaking by Martin Bygate.  In my review of that book, I complained a lot about the format.
This book has the exact same format.  And so consequently, I have all of the same complaints again.
This book is divided into three sections.  The first section (p.1-71) introduces all the necessary theory.  The second section (p.75-133) is a self-study, which asks the reader to apply the theory critically to selections of real syllabuses through a series of guiding questions.  And the third section (p.137-157) is a series of suggestions for research tasks.
In terms of getting useful information, only the first section is of any value.  And perhaps if I had any sense, I would have stopped reading the book there.  Really the only reason I kept on trudging through the final 86 pages is because I have this quirk where I like to say I've read a book cover to cover so that I can review it on my blog.  But I got very little use out of it.

As with Speaking by Martin Bygate, this book is not really meant to be read so much as it's meant to be worked through.  Almost every page has TASKs that will pop up giving the reader questions to work through.


It's not unusual to have multiple tasks per page, as you can see from this excerpt of page 51.
This was much to my annoyance, because I'm the type of person who prefers just reading a book straight through without having to stop on every page to do tasks.
If there are going to be tasks in a book, I prefer that there be an answer key in the back (at least some of the tasks seemed like they should have clear right or wrong answers), or maybe some sort of commentary you could consult for the subjective questions.  But without being able to check my answers afterwards, I didn't see much point in doing the task.
So I just read through the book without doing any of the tasks.  Which for the most part meant that all the TASKs on every page were just an annoyance to me.
Occasionally, however, you do get the sense that David Nunan was using the task questions to heavily imply what he felt reluctant to say outright.  For example, after quoting Krashen and Terrell's hypothesizes on page 51, TASK 51 was:
Do you disagree with any of these principles?
Consider the principals you agree with: Do you think we need empirical evidence on these, or are they just common sense?
Do you think that Krashen and Terrell can legitimately claim authorship of principles such as 'develop communication skills'?
For which of the principles would you like to see firm evidence?
...so, this is essentially David Nunan saying that Krashen and Terrell don't have sufficient evidence for their claims, but doing it in the form of leading questions, right?

Also, as with Speaking by Martin Bygate, the TASKs are usually located after you've read through the relevant section.  For example, on page 67, there was a list of "Arguments against the use of performance objectives" followed by a list countering the arguments against the use of performance objectives.  As I read through the two lists, I kept wondering why the arguments in the second list didn't seem to line up with the arguments in the first list.  Until I got to TASK 65 on the following page: "Match the arguments from List A with the counter arguments from List B".  Ahh... so that's what I was supposed to be doing.  Why not just put that part first?
And this was a problem throughout the book.  It had also been a problem throughout Speaking by Martin Bygate, the other book I had read in the series.  So it appears to be a problem with the series in general.  Ironic.  You'd think if anyone would understand the concept of "task before text", it would be people working in the teacher training industry.

However, my complaints about the format of the book aside, I did find the information in section one to be pretty interesting.  I liked that David Nunan gave both the arguments for and the arguments against various types of syllabuses.  It got me thinking.
It was also, as I mentioned above, very terminology heavy.  So quite useful for anyone doing Delta Module 3.

Section 2 was examples of real-life syllabuses, to which the reader was supposed to apply the theory from section 1.  I think this could have been really interesting if there had been more guidance or a commentary.  But instead it was just all TASKs.
Without an answer key or commentary on the tasks, I'm not sure how much I would have gotten out of them even if I had done them.  But at any rate, I had no patience to do them.

The third section was all TASKs for independent research.  At this point, the book is no longer even trying to engage the reader.  It's just all lists of tasks, aims, resources, procedures, and evaluations.

I am so falling asleep right now as I read this....
...I complain, but really I have no one but myself to blame.  Clearly this book was not meant to be read straight through at a coffee shop.  It was meant to be used as a reference book.  You're only meant to skim it for relevant information for your essay.  Or, if your ambitious enough to actually do the TASKs, you can use it as a study guide.
I personally just have this weird quirk where I like to read books cover to cover and review them on my blog.  But no sane person need read this one cover-to-cover.

Other Notes
* Page 63, section 5.3 on performance objectives in language teaching had a curious last sentence.  I think it's a mistake, but let me know if I'm missing anything.  
So that last sentence should read: "specifying output rather than input", right?  Because it's based on the student's performance, so we're evaluating the output, right?
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