Unit 1. Synthetic versus analytical
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So my name’s Crayton Walker and I’m going to talk to you about the way that syllabuses
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tend to fall into one of two different categories. The first one covers things like product-based
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syllabuses, those syllabuses that focus more on the ‘what’, grammatical syllabuses,
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functional syllabuses, lexical syllabuses, situational syllabuses. They start, of course,
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with the language, and we tend to divide the language up, as syllabus writers, and often
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we will do it based on research. We saw that research into discourse and pragmatics resulted
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in functional syllabuses which focused more on functional areas and functional exponents.
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So we’ve got people in universities researching the language, looking at what the language
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maybe consists of and how it works. We, as syllabus writers, tend to divide the language
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up then, particularly if we are writing more according to a product-based syllabus, divide
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the language up into units, digestible units, units which are digestible for our learners.
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Those units, in the case of a grammatical syllabus, would typically be the tenses; simple
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past, present perfect, present continuous. [A] functional syllabus would be those functional
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areas: asking for permission, giving an opinion, agreeing, disagreeing. If it was a lexical
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syllabus they would be the lexis, be that words or phrases, maybe we would group the
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lexical items semantically into groups of semantically related items. Whichever type
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of syllabus it is, we’re still dividing it, or we feel the need to divide it up into
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these units which we would then teach, either in the material or actually physically in
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the classroom, for our learner to learn only for that learner hopefully to put all those
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little digestible units back together again in order to start speaking or writing the
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language. But many would say , well isn’t this rather a long way round? We’re starting
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with language which we then divide up into the units, which are taught, and learnt, for
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those units only to be put back together again in order to produce the language. The people
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who would perhaps say that would be those that named this type of syllabus a ‘synthetic
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syllabus’. I feel that that name is a bit of a cheat. Synthetic – what does it mean?
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Well, synthetic is negative. Synthetic material – it’s not natural. I don’t think that
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really is a very fair name. And also that, to some extent, is pedagogically sound – you
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will find that in lots of different situations in education. Mathematics divides the subject
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up, such that it can be taught to students, for those bits of mathematics to be glued
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back together again in order to get a holistic picture. That way of dividing something up
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into units so that we can actually teach it, so that our learners can learn it, that’s
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not an unusual thing in education. However, there are those that say, well why not have
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an analytical syllabus? Where we have, to some extent, that learner has now become an
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acquirer. We tend to ‘acquire’ our first language, and ‘learn’ our second language.
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The synthetic syllabus is more perhaps associated with a learning situation and an analytical
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syllabus is more associated with a situation where we have an acquirer and we have that
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first language being acquired – an acquisitionist situation if you like. A typical analytical
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syllabus would indeed be something like task-based learning, and the task-based syllabus. So
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the whole idea with task based learning is that we are exposing the learner to language,
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and because that learner is motivated by the task and so on, that that learner will, and
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it shouldn’t really be called a learner, that acquirer will acquire the language in
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that situation. So we have an analytical syllabus, typically task-based learning, based on very
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much an acquisitionist model, and we have a synthetic syllabus, based very much more
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on a learner type model. Thank you very much.