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Do you have to be such a slave to the syllabus?

If you are a language teacher working in a school you almost certainly have to follow a syllabus, such as, in England and Wales, the GCSE or A-level. Because of a real or perceived lack of time and an understandable sense of duty to the students, you probably stick fairly closely to the programme for fear of missing anything out.

The only problem with this approach is that you might spend too long on boring topics and deprive yourself of doing subjects or tasks you and the students would enjoy more. For instance, when I taught AQA AS-level one of the "sub-topics" was sport and I didn't feel it generated that much communication so I would pay lip service to it by doing a text on drug taking in sport and a discussion sheet to cover key vocabulary and likely exam oral questions. I ignored all the material in the bland text book we had available. This left time to look at different issues, show a movie, read a short story, do a task-based activity or play some useful games.

Similarly, if I came across boring or hard to teach sections of the KS3 and KS4 text books I would happily ignore them and do my own thing. It's about having a sense of what students will be motivated by, not about following the syllabus at all cost.

The thing is, much of the most useful high-frequency and salient vocabulary crosses topic areas so you should not feel you have to teach unstimulating material when you see it. You can choose to be more independent. What's more, events almost force you to move away from the set programme - it could be an election, a terrorist attack, a major scientific discovery, a sporting event or a natural disaster.

An AQA Chief Examiner once gave some good advice at a meeting I attended. Just imagine, he said, that A-level is general studies through the medium of the target language. Be prepared to do your own thing. The same should hold for the new A-levels from 2016. Not every topic you teach need to be rooted in the target language culture or the set themes. Be yourself, have confidence in your own judgment and teach what stimulates you and your classes.


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