Curriculum and the Approaches

Let's have a look at the different concepts that I take in account when I teach Spanish:

Student centered approach - STUDENT CENTERED LEARNING

 This curriculum is characterized by being centered on the pupil, which is permanently opened to intervention by teachers and students, and process-oriented. There is a new dynamic interaction established between the four components of the curriculum (goals, contents, methodology and evaluation).

In an opened and focused on the student curricula, interventions of teachers and students are oriented to processes that take place in its development.

Classroom work procedures include all types of evaluation activities from the beginning, and the necessary review of the goals and the selected content, as well as its adaptation to the actual conditions of the classroom.

The development of a student centered curriculum is carried out in successive levels or degrees of concretion: from the most general (usually corresponding to the nature of the institution to which it belongs), to the particular (corresponding to the Group of learning and, ultimately, students)

The role and functions of teachers and students are involved in the decision about objectives, content and methodology; teachers, on the other hand, assume a key role in the development of the curriculum, making decisions and planning activities during the development.

The analysis of needs, is a procedure by means of which recognizes the status of students in relation to the objectives. These are defined in terms of language skills and also of learning skills. All this is closely related with the development of autonomy and learning strategies.

In the field of second language teaching, the recognition of the importance of personal factors for learning has had a great influence. 
L. van Lier (1996) considers a processual, dynamic and holistic view of the curriculum, which understands the learning as a social process and the interdependence of knowledge and value systems.

Process-based teaching approach

A process-based teaching approach is oriented towards the way to learn the language, to the teaching-learning processes that lead to an effective language learning, taking in consideration the needs and capabilities of different students.

As Garcia Santa-Cecilia (1995:) points out, the proposals of a process-based approach coincides with the concern by other aspects of learning: a student centered approach, the development of the autonomy, the dynamics of class, learner needs analysis, the negotiation processes and the teacher role.

In this approach, there is no selection of contents prior to the beginning of the course (which is made by the product-based approach), and the specification of objectives takes place during the course of learning, through a negotiation between teacher and students.

According to White (1988), the process based approach is characterized by:

     being focused on how you learn the language, insists more on the learning process than its content.

     The objectives are established through negotiation between student (s) and Professor, both are responsible for the decisions, and both negotiate the contents;

     The evaluation of the achievement of the objectives in relation to the success criteria that the learners have.

According to Vigotsky, Learning is most effective when the learner is working with another person - Professor, fellow - in the level immediately above the current capabilities.

Analysis of learning needs  

Needs analysis is fundamental for the development of the curriculum, which is related to the definition of objectives with the selection of the contents of a program.

We need to distinguish between objective needs and subjective needs. 

According to Richterich (1985), the objective needs arise from the social, cultural and educational conditions of the students, their level of proficiency in the language that they are going to study and use; analysis of these requirements is the product learning-oriented and carried out by an expert or group of experts prior to the launching of courses and without the involved teachers (in an institution) and students.

 Subjective needs, on the other hand, relate to the factors of learning, especially the personal factors (affective and cognitive) of the group of students and of each of its members; they are oriented to the learning process and, consequently, the analysis is especially conducted during the development of the course.
In that sense, subjective needs analysis is not only closely linked to curricula focusing on the student, but also to the development of autonomy in learning and working with the metacognitive and cognitive strategies. 

A study of the communicative situations in which the group can be determine the units of the program: analysis of discourse, in the form of concepts and linguistic functions that students would be able to carry out, the social roles that likely would play, the types of text that should be able to handle, communicating the issues that they would have to be able to express themselves (read, write, talk, etc.), forms and linguistic structures, as well as vocabulary, that should be aware to be able to do all of the above.

Through various procedures and techniques, some class activities focus in the analysis and recognition of these needs and consequent negotiation of objectives and content. In the Task Based Approach the initial task of all tasks usually consist of some form of objective and subjective needs analysis.

 needs ???

•             OBJECTIVE social, cultural and educational conditions of the students - level of proficiency in the target language

•             SUBJECTIVE factors of learning -personal factors (affective and cognitive)

I

I

V

autonomy + self-sufficiency - knowledge creation

Attention to meaning, focus on meaning

and so on..

The partners really establish interpersonal communication when they build their speech in cooperation, focusing their attention on the meaning and of their statements.

From the point of view of the didactics, the attention to the meaning focuses on communicative approaches, adopting different models. All of them are based on the actual use of the language in learning activities in school settings. These models range from language immersion to based on the content (content based language learning), learning through the curriculum process, focus on tasks, etc. All of them propose to the learner a goal of communication through the use of any resources of the L2 that has at its disposal; to get it you must also apply communication strategies relevant at each stage of the development of their intervention.

Recently highlighted the need to accompany the actual use of the language in the classroom with attention to the way procedures, in order to overcome some of the obstacles observed in the models based on the exclusive attention to the meaning, such as the absence of certain features of the grammar of the language in the productions of the learners (attributed to that the learner does not perceive them in the adduct gets)the fossilization of certain forms and stagnation in certain levels of competition.

Information gap

Information gap refers to a communicative situation in which information is only known by one or some of the people involved in the act of communication.

Real communication, in which it is an exchange of information, improving the acquisition of a foreign language and directs the attention to the comprehensive skills: speaking and listening, writing and reading.

From the Decade of 1980 the communicative approach evolves to tasks based approach, which proposes the implementation in the classroom of information gap exercises.

Therefore exists between the learners a need for communication in the foreign language, since each has to find something that only your partner knows, for to complete your vacuum information and thus successfully solve the task.

The information available to each student is partial and should be supplemented by information from other fellow or member of the group, in other words: each one has to request or transmit information - usually orally - to the other.

In all these cases the learners practice skills such as oral interaction, the use of grammatical knowledge, pronunciation and communication strategies, making use of their experiences and previously acquired knowledge.