Considerations in Language Syllabus Design

Abstract

There has been a great deal of excitement and activity in the area of second language teaching and learning In the recent past. The twentieth century has seen the rise and fall of many approaches to language teaching.

In the past, the task of learning a language involved understanding a large number of sometimes highly complex grammatical rules. This went together with the development of an ability to translate into and from the foreign language.

Later, language learning replaced translation with habit formation when the audio-lingual method came to the fore-front. Unfortunately, it did not live up to expectation. This gave rise to a lot of misgivings about the "fashions" of language teaching.