THIẾT kế CHƯƠNG TRÌNH NGHE nói có sử DỤNG VIDEO CHO NGƯỜI học TIẾNG ANH TRÌNH độ TIỀN TRUNG cấp hệ KHÔNG CHUYÊN

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and more importantly by suggesting video techniques, classroom activities and other
general guidelines. The study ends in part three– Conclusion, which briefly summarizes
what has been written and suggests further study.

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PART 2 DEVELOPMENT
CHAPTER 1 LITERATURE REVIEW
1. Syllabus and curriculum
Syllabus and syllabus designing have been no longer new in the context of education.
Teachers, including those of foreign languages, not only have been fascinated in this field,
but must also take it on fundamental importance.
In spite of its essentiality, it is not an easy task to give out a thorough definition of syllabus
in current literature. Besides, it is sometimes used and/or misused interchangeably with
curriculum. The clarification of these two terms is not just for the sake of naming or the act
of definition, but for the benefit to designers themselves. On well knowing what a syllabus
or a curriculum is, designers should have better guidelines and therefore, is more likely to
conduct their tasks more effectively.
A syllabus is more specific and more concrete than a curriculum, and a curriculum may
contain a number of syllabi. A curriculum, hence, may specify only the goals – what
students are supposed to be able to do at the end of the course; meanwhile a syllabus
specifies the content of the lessons used to help students reach their goals. A curriculum
includes several syllabuses, but not vice verse (Dubin & Olshtain, 1986).
One of the most widely repeated definitions of curriculum is given by Roberton (1987):
“The curriculum includes the goals, objectives, content, processes, resources, and means of
evaluation of all learning experienced, planned for students both in and out of the school
and community.”

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Syllabus, as defined by A.M. Shaw (1986), is “a statement of the plan for any part of
curriculum excluding the element of curriculum evaluation itself.” It can be interpreted that
a syllabus is, said as W. R. Lee (1986), some sort of guide to the teacher: it tells the teacher
what to teach; and it tells others what the teacher is supposed to be teaching.
2. Two major strategies in syllabus design: Synthetic-Analytic syllabus planning
There are different ways in which syllabus proposals of one sort or another might be
analysed. One dimension of analysis which has been the subject of a great deal of
discussions and comments is the synthetic/analytic dimension.
Wilkins (1976), who was first to draw attention to the distinction between these two
strategies, described the synthetic approach as follows:
“A synthetic language teaching strategy is one in which the different parts of language are
taught separately and step by step so that acquisition is a process of gradual accumulation
of parts until the whole structure of language has been built up.”
Though not restricted to grammatical syllabuses, synthetic approaches are apparently
recognised in these types of syllabus, which are specified as discrete lists of grammatical
items and in which the classroom focus is on the teaching of these items as separate and
discrete.
In contrast with synthetic syllabuses, analytic syllabuses are “organised in terms of
purposes for which people are learning language and the kinds of language performance
that are necessary to meet those purposes.” (Wilkins, 1976)

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Situational syllabuses are among various examples for analytic approaches, where students
are presented with chunks of language including structures of varying degrees of difficulty.
The starting point for syllabus design is not the grammatical system of the language, but
the communicative purposes for which language is used.
3. Three principle types of language syllabus
3.1. Grammatical syllabuses
This has been the most common syllabus type (McDonough, 1981), in which syllabus
input is selected and graded according to grammatical notions of simplicity and
complexity.
The most rigid grammatical syllabuses supposedly introduce one item at a time and require
mastery of that item before moving on to the next. According to McDonough, “the
transition from lesson to lesson is intended to enable material in one lesson to prepare the
ground for the next; and conversely for material in the next to appear to grow out of the
previous one.”
A sample syllabus of this type is given by McDonough as follows:
Lesson

Content
1 Has drilled copula and adjective
combinations:
She is happy.
2 Introduces the _ing form:
She is driving a car.
3 Introduces existential there:
There is a man standing near the car.
4 Distinguishes between mass and count nouns:
There are some oranges and some cheese on
the table.

5 Introduces the verb like and want:

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Lesson

Content
I like oranges.
6 Introduces don’t:
I don’t like cheese.
(McDonough 1981,21)
It is generally assumed behind most grammatical syllabuses that a language consists of a
finite set of rules which can be combined in various ways to make meanings; and further
that these rules can be learned one by one. Rutherford calls this the “accumulated entries”
view of language learning.
This point of view, however, presents a problem: it is difficult to isolate and present one
discrete grammatical item at a time, particularly if a context for language needs providing.
Another problem involves in grading syllabus input in the sequence of complexity in terms
of grammar notions. According to Pienemann and Johnston’s research in 1987, “the
acquisition of grammatical structures will be determined by how difficult those items are to
process psychologically rather than how simple or complex they are grammatically.” They
illustrate this with the third person ‘s’ morpheme. Grammatically this is quite a
straightforward item. However, it is notoriously difficult for students to master. The
difficulty is blamed for fact that the form of the verb is governed or determined by the
person and number of the noun or noun phrase in the subject position. In effect, the
students have to hold this person and number in working memory and then produce the
appropriate form of the verb. Thus the difficulty is created, not by the grammar, but by the
constraints in short-term memory.
Finally, the assumption that knowledge of grammar equals the ability to use language is
quickly found out to be false by students and this may lower their learning motivation as
they do not see what being taught corresponds to their needs.

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3.2. Situational syllabuses
In situational syllabuses, the content of language teaching is the collection of real or
imaginary situations in which language occurs or is used. These syllabuses tend to consist
of unit indicating specific situations, such as ‘At the station’, ‘At the check-in’, etc.
This sort of syllabus aims at ‘real language’, which leads more directly to the learner’s
ability to communicate in specific settings. However, the meaningful conversational
interchanges in specific contexts are responsible for haphazard arrangement of language
patterns in the dialogues, which tends to limit the effectiveness for teaching the patterns. A
solution is to combine the structural and situational syllabuses, resulting in structured
dialogues, directed discourses, or situational grammar skills.
3.3. Functional-notional syllabuses
During the 1970s, a syllabus known as ‘functional-notional syllabus’ was given rise to as a
landmark for a large scaled attempt to incorporate a broader view of language
systematically into the language syllabus.
Notional-functional syllabuses, placing the students and their communicative purposes at
the centre, are aimed at making communicative competence the goal of language
teaching/learning and at developing procedures for the teaching of the four language skills
that acknowledge the interdependence of language and communication (Canh, 2004).
In general, the term ‘function’ may be described as the communicative purposes for which
we use language (e.g. agreeing, warning, etc.), while ‘notion’ refers to the conceptual
meanings (e.g. objects, entities, states of affairs, etc.) expressed through language.

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According to Finocchiaro and Brumfit (1983), “functional-notionalism has the tremendous
merit of placing the students and their communicative purposes at the centre of the
curriculum.”
The benefits of adopting a functional-notional orientation are listed as follows:
1. It sets realistic learning tasks.
2. It provides for the teaching of everyday, real-world language.
3. It leads us to emphasise receptive activities before rushing the students to premature
performance.
4. It recognises that the speaker must have a real purpose for speaking, and something
to talk about.
5. Communication will be intrinsically motivating because it expresses basic
communicative functions.
6. It enables the teacher to exploit sound psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, linguistic and
educational principles.
7. It can develop naturally from existing teaching methodologies.
8. It enables a spiral curriculum to be used which reintroduces grammatical, topical and
cultural material.
9. It allows for the development of flexible, modular courses.
10. It provides for the widespread promotion of foreign language courses.
(Finocchiaro and Brumfit 1983:17)
Despite those advantages, this approach, like others, provokes designers with the same two
central issues: the selection of items for the syllabus, and the grading and sequencing of
these items. Furthermore, these issues turn out to be even more complex. Decisions about
which items to include in the syllabus can no longer be made on linguistic grounds alone,
and designers need include items which they imagine will help the students carry out the
communicative purposes for which they need the language. The grading of these functional
items becomes much more complex because there are few apparent objective means for

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deciding that one functional item, for instance apologising, is either simpler or more
difficult than another one like thanking, for example. (Widdowson, 1979).
3.4. Conclusion
There is just in theory such a solely synthetic or analytic syllabus. In practice, courses tend
to be typified as more-or-less synthetic or more-or-less analytic according to the
prominence given discrete elements in the selection and grading of input.
The two central issues for syllabus designers to concern: the selection of items for the
syllabus, and the grading and sequencing of these items, are found problematic in any
types of syllabus. Nevertheless, each type has its own merits that are worth considering.
This is partly why syllabus designers tend to combine more than one type of syllabus
together, which results in such a more-or-less grammatical syllabus, more-or-less
situational syllabus, or more-or-less functional-notional syllabus.
The strategy of syllabus planning employed in my syllabus is more-or-less analytic one,
where the communicative purposes for which the language is used are the very first to deal
with, and where suitable structures are provided in relation to such purposes. In terms of
type, the syllabus of mine tends to be more-or-less functional-notional syllabus, in which
the students and their communicative purposes are placed at the centre of the course.
4. Using video in the language classroom
Balatova (1994) suggests that unlike students, who listened in sound-only conditions, the
use of audio-video conditions were more consistent in their perception of the story, in the
sense that difficult and easy passages formed a pattern. In addition, her research also notes,
"It is also interesting to point out that students in the sound-only conditions in the two

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experiments were less successful in maintaining the interest and concentration in listening"
(Balatova, 1994, p.521).
Heron, Hanley and Cole (1994) also hypothesize that the more meaningful an advanced
organizer is the more impact it can have on comprehension and retention. Their results of
using twelve different videos with foreign language students indicates that scores improved
when advanced organizers, such as a pictures and/or visual stimuli, are used with the
video. Perhaps the findings from these studies can be attributed to the fact that video offers
contextual support and/or helps students to visualize words as well as meanings.
4.1. General benefits of using video in the language classroom
The benefits of using video in the language classroom can be listed as follows:
Firstly, it is quite easy to notice the compelling power of video in the classroom, a power
that is even enhanced by concentration on short sequences. The eye is caught, and this
excites interest in the meaning of the words. Video, in other words, stimulates students’
motivation, and maintains their interest and concentration better than sound-only learning
environment (Balatova, 1994). Empirical evidence has shown that attention spans are
lowered when watching video. “The first signs of distraction in the groups (of sound-only
conditions) appeared after the first minute, and by the end of four minutes, distraction
spread all over the groups; while in the video conditions several students became distracted
after six minutes, some students lost concentration after ten minutes and around a third
kept watching until the end. ” (Balatova, 1994)
Secondly, using video in language teaching can enhance students’ understanding and
retention of information (Herron, 1994). Video offers contextual support and helps

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students to visualize words as well as their meanings. Canning-Wilson suggests that
images contextualised in video can help reinforce the language, provided the students can
see immediate meaning in term of vocabulary recognition in their first language.
Video provides visual stimuli such as environment and this can lead to and generate
prediction, speculation and a chance to activate background schemata when viewing a
visual scene re-enacted (Canning-Wilson, 2000). The use of visuals overall helps students
predict information, infer ideas and analyse the world that is brought into the classroom.
Another benefit of video concerning comprehension enhancement is the fact that it brings
students all kinds of situation, with full contextual back-up. Many students find it rather
difficult to communicate with other people whose voices are different from those they have
got used to in their course-books, where most of the listening is ‘built up’ in a studio with
‘standard’ voices.
Thirdly, on the one hand “video is used to help enhance the meaning of message trying to
be conveyed by the speakers through the use of paralinguistic cues”; on the other hand, “it
allows students to see body rhythm and speech rhythm in second language discourse
through the use of authentic language and speed of speech in various situations”. (Canning-
Wilson, 2000). To this extent, video adds benefits of providing real language and cultural
information.
Fourthly, video is a window on English-language culture. A small amount of showing is
worth hours of telling from a teacher or a course-book (Jane Sherman, 2003). For instance,
it shows how people live and think and behave – local culture with the small letter c.

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