The teaching of language functions as systematic objective based aproach

Abstract

At present many foreign language educators derive their wisdom in matters of classroom teaching mainly from linguistics and its related fields of psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics and hardly consult mainstream educationists, especially those working in the field of general instruction design (Politzer, 1981:31; Stern, 1983:419). Consequently, many of the developments in the area of instruction design have seen their way to but a limited number of foreign language classrooms. This paper tries to introduce one such development, viz, the application of a systematic objective-based approach to the teaching of language functions and notions. It is beyond the scope of this paper to go into a detailed discussion of the principles and characteristics of a learning system. However, it may suffice to point out that a learning system consists of a number of components that interact with one another in order to achieve a well specified learning objective. (See Gagne and Briggs 1974, 1979 for further discussion of a learning system). The approach we are presenting here is a modified version of Gagne and Brigg's design and we have developed it in an attempt to make our training of •EFl teachers more effective.