What’s the most important part of any ESL Curriculum? The content of course. Now that you have taken care of all of the preliminaries of ESL curriculum development, you can dig in and begin crafting and compiling the perfect resources to make your ESL school successful.
In the article on the preliminaries of curriculum development, we discussed how to discover your student audience and their personal and academic objectives. Now let’s put that information to good use by identifying learning goals for your students and the objectives they need to achieve to gain competency within each target. This step will help you identify your course content and create academic roadmaps for your students.
The goals of your curriculum should describe the intended learning outcomes of the course. They should be realistic, student-centered, and describe real-world student behaviors and attitudes. Mainly, ensure the learning goals of your ESL curriculum will align well with the variety of classrooms within your school.
The first step in creating curriculum content should be to ask yourself these questions:
Your answers to the first question, “What do you want your students to accomplish?” will be the aims of your curriculum. Your ESL curriculum goals should align with whatever standards your successful school follows. Your curriculum should include goals for listening, speaking, reading, and writing.
Here are sample goals for intermediate ESL students:
These objectives are the destinations on your student’s academic roadmap. Each target should have a clear list of goals the students must achieve before they complete the goals. These goals should align closely with the latest ELT standards.
The purpose of creating clear student objectives is to give your educators, and their students, benchmarks for success. Breaking down your overall curriculum goals into smaller objectives will help your teachers prepare and enable your students to not become overwhelmed.
Your academic objectives should always relate directly to a goal and be stated, precisely taking into consideration what the students will achieve through this goal. Much like the overall goals, the objectives should be cut down if necessary to ensure their attainable during the course.
Here are four important things to consider when writing student learning objectives:
Following the creation of the ESL Goals and Objectives of your curriculum, an important step to take is to reduce these goals by 30%. Often curriculum developers will get caught in an idealistic mentality regarding the goals students are capable of achieving during the school year. It is important to remember your curriculum should include a variety of supplementary materials for teachers which will lengthen the lessons. It is much more harmful to confuse students through the needlessly dense material than it is to pad lessons with outside activities.
There are several systems teachers can use to set standards and measure the achievements of students throughout the school year. Let’s begin by talking about rubrics, which are one of the most important steps in crafting an efficient system of assessment for your ESL school when developing curriculum.
When creating rubrics for your ESL program, begin by writing basic systems of measurement for reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Each of these areas within the language should have different criteria within the rubric. Below you will find sample rubric categories and the importance of each measurement.
The traditional categories of measurement for ESL reading are:
The traditional categories of measurement for ESL writing are:
The traditional categories of measurement for ESL speaking are:
The traditional categories of measurement for ESL listening are:
Thanks to advances in educational technology, there are many different types of rubric creation software on the market today. Experts typically agree, however, that creating your own rubrics for your curriculum is the better choice because many of the programs generate standard, generalized rubrics. You can still use rubric creation software, but it is necessary to adjust the templates to meet your school personalized standards.
Many teachers argue about the effectiveness of traditional testing when determining the skills of students, and ELLs in particular. However, at this time in the education industry, no other standardized method has been widely accepted. Therefore, it is crucial for you to understand the current best practices for creating tests for your ESL curriculum.
Follow these eight steps when creating tests for your ESL curriculum:
At this point, you should already have generated the necessary information to determine your student and curricular objectives, so it should be fairly easy to create your tests. There are many different online (paid and free) programs that make creating test materials easier for educators. As with rubrics, however, many of these programs can produce content that is too general or is prone to typos and other errors. Since this is the case, always be sure to proofread the material generated, and adjust it according to your needs or preference.
Particularly for ELs, informal assessments are extremely important for educators to understand if students are grasping and retaining the mechanics of the English language.
These types of assessments are often used as alternatives to testing and have been proven useful. They can, however, supplement traditional tests. Using these types of assessments allows educators to check in on the ongoing progress of every student, allowing them to catch misunderstandings in their early stages.
Informal assessments come in many different forms, but here are the most common types of informal assessments and their functions:
Creating goals, objectives, rubrics, and testing methods for your the curriculum for your ESL school is the most time consuming and tedious step. It is also, however, the most important step in the process. Avoid the common pitfall of curriculum creation by giving yourself plenty of time to work on these plans, and bring in other educators to fill in whatever gaps you might overlook.
If you continue working hard during this process, then you are guaranteed to provide your educators with a carefully crafted curriculum that will meet their needs and will be user-friendly. The next article in the ESL Curriculum Series will discuss how to use technology in the classroom, and finally how to perfect your curriculum.
On the Your Agora platform, there are many tools which make grading and testing simpler for your educators. When creating your ESL Curriculum, do not forget that all of the valuable ESL education tools on Your Agora are completely free for the student and the teacher. Utilizing this platform will help decrease the amount of time spent on ESL curriculum development as well as the time your teachers spend grading.