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A Toolbox for College EFL Program DesignI. Support for ChangeBefore any curricular innovation, there must be institutional support. Most EFL educators working in Japan operate within the constraints of an existing English, Business, Law, or Communications department and are not free to implement a systematic curriculum development process according to the principles of EFL teaching. This situation is closer to the idea of "stakeholders" in a curriculum as once described by Connelly, Irvine, and Enns (1980). The program evolves through the interaction of such stakeholders as teachers, students, and administrators, especially those within the university bureaucracy.In our case, we needed the assistance of key members of our 36-member department, including the chairman, and a number of senior professors, and a planning committee to establish the need for new courses. It was at that point that I was hired, my job description including program administration and course writing in lieu of supervising or editing student theses. To achieve these things, we held extensive, often exhausting meetings with other university officials during the early years of the program. Limiting class size was obviously a financial issue because the university was required to hire additional part-time teachers. To our surprise, there was strong resistance against ranking classes because it appeared to discriminate against the weaker students. We had to convince the university administration of the feasibility of our plans as well as their legitimacy. Ultimately, we were able to negotiate three different classes, to some degree accommodating the advanced and returnee students, and those students with lesser language ability. The benefits were that it became easier for teachers to plan for their classes; better students were not be held back by weaker ones; nor were weaker students intimidated by better ones. |
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