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Introduction

Designinga course is a huge undertaking, and what is even more challenging is designinga language course, as there are so many factors to take into account, such aschoosing the appropriate topics, language items selection, the number of andthe types of activities and exercises employed, the students’ needs, and thegrading and sequencing of the language units (Woodrow 2017). On the other hand,designing a course is fulfilling as such work is the best demonstration of alanguage teacher’s capability. In this article, I will provide a detailedproposal for the course, in the order of a summary, areas of consultedliterature, the target context, needs analysis, syllabus type, and practicaland theoretical benefits.

Main Body

Course Summary

Thiscourse is targeted at Chinese public-school students in year 9 in developedcities who would like to take this course as a supplementary module to theirEnglish lessons in school.

Thevocabulary in this course is comprised of up-to-date and authentic lexicalitems. The vast majority of the vocabulary falls within the most frequent 2,000words, specifically the 1700th to 1900th items in ‘New General Service List’complied by Brezina and Gablasova (2015); but this course prides itself more onmulti-word items, namely idioms, phrasal verbs, collocations and otherformulaic expressions that would be largely chosen from ‘English Collocationsin Use Intermediate’ by McCarthy and O’Dell (2017), ‘English Phrasal Verbs inUse Intermediate’ by McCarthy and O’Dell (2017) and the compilation of idiomsby Rafatbakhsh andAhmadi(2019); some of the items may appear in traditionalEnglish textbooks, but a large fraction of them are rarely seen in thesetextbooks used in China, and therefore they are the distinctive traits of thiscourse. This content is based on the junior high school English syllabus thatis set to enable students to master around 1,700 words and more than 300phrasal verbs before they graduate. Students will be able to learn another 600lexical items involving mainly formulaic language and some individual words,adding to their lexis and enabling them to better engage in daily English,primarily navigating watching authentic American and British TV shows, speakingEnglish quite naturally and quite fluently and thus being able to interact andmake friends with English speakers living in big Chinese cities — the two aimsof this course.

Theactual usage of these lexical items in contexts will be corpus-based — mainlyCorpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and British National Corpus 2014(BNC2014) — to ensure the language in this course is natural and correct.

Thelearning strategies involved in this course include word parts — affixes androots — and productive vocabulary practice — speaking exercises. More detaileddescriptions will be provided later in the ‘areas of literature’ section.

Areas of Literature

Inthe dissertation, I will refer to literature relating to the overall design ofmy course, needs analysis, vocabulary teaching methodology, corpus linguisticsspecifically corpus-based methods in designing learning materials and teachingactivities, syllabus design, morphological vocabulary parts, formulaiclanguage, ESL speaking building with a focus of fluency in particular, and theuse of TV or movies in developing vocabulary.

Thefirst area of literature is more generally linked to the course design. Nation(2006) detailed the lexical coverage of spoken texts for a range of vocabularysize and this underpins one important goal of this course — to enable thestudents to truly engage in daily English. The ‘Involvement Load Hypothesis’put forward by Hulstijn and Laufer (2001) divided engagement activities intothree levels, and this can be a great reference when designing activities formaximum gains. To inform my course design, particularly exercises andactivities in class, I will draw upon Folse’s article (2012), which gave greatcredit to retrievals with regards to vocabulary retention. 

Formulaiclanguage has long been overlooked in ESL classes, but it is crucial tolearners’ language proficiency. Anyone who can speak English would agree thatthere are abundant examples of words that frequently go together, includingsayings, structures, idioms, phrasal verbs and collocations. Therefore, literaturerelated to formulaic language is indispensable to this vocabulary course.Vilkaitė (2016) madean effort to investigate the distribution of formulaic language, uncovering itsoften-ignored properties. The book by Siyanova-Chanturia and Pellicer-Sanchez(2019) went further to include an even broader scope from a second languageacquisition perspective. It clearly stated the pedagogical implications inchapter 8 as well as touching on the practice of employing corpus in teachingformulaic expressions in chapter 10. These two parts would be valuable indeveloping practical teaching methods. Formulaic language is also central tospeaking, especially speaking fluency. The work by Wood (2010) linked these twofactors, using reasoning as well as the scientific discoveries of humans’cognitive processes of storing and retrieving formulaic language withquantitative and qualitative studies to back up the claims, making this work arobust empirical reference. In comparison, Cooper (1998) and Grant (2007)focused solely on idioms, introducing interactive activities specifically aimedat learning idioms.

Affixesand roots can play a profound role in gaining a much larger vocabulary size. Vocabularycan be strengthened by learning word parts though using word parts to deductthe meaning of words is not always accurate. For my target students, learningthe very few affixes and roots that are most common is a sensible choice whenit comes to cost-effectiveness. Yurtbasi’s article in 2015 detailed thesignificance of employing roots and affixes knowledge when learning individualwords. Furthermore, Yurbasi listed the most useful roots and affixes (27 and 55separately), making this literature essential to my dissertation. Another workby Rasinski et. al. (2011) also justified the importance of English affixes androots, in conjunction with a set of intriguing games for teaching suchknowledge in class.

Onedistinctive part of this course is the element of speaking development. Thisfocus is aligned with the four strands Nation proposed in 2007, particularlythe ‘output’ and ‘fluency’ strands. Saito and Hanzawa (2018) gave unambiguousdescriptions of the role input plays in developing oral output. Nation’s otherarticle (1989), along with the studies conducted by Namaziandost et al. (2019)and Namaziandost et al. (2020) revealed how effective a range of speakingexercise and speaking activities were, which would provide valuable insightsinto the designed activities aimed at enhancing speaking fluency.

Althoughone of the aims of this course is to enable students to enjoy English TV showsand movies, it does not mean only when students have finished this course canthey engage with these media. In effect, TV shows and movies will be a usefulinstrument for teaching. In order to figure out the best mode of watching TVfor highest gains in vocabulary, Pujadas andMuñoz’s work (2019) should be consulted, as it compared different modes of TV watching and the result favoured captioned TV. One question arising here is ‘is TV watching really effective?’. The answer is yes, and it is also an enjoyable process. The effectiveness of this methodis validated by Webb (2010), which involved corpora to study vocabularyacquisition in TV watching.

Arange of vocabulary teaching methods will be deployed in this course. The designof the activities will be informed by Min’s study (2008) which corroborates theeffectiveness of vocabulary-strengthening tasks including ‘matching’ and‘fill-in-the-blank exercises’. Tahir et al.’s study (2020) can justify theexplicit teaching approach as the dominant teaching method. The study conductedby Halici Page and Mede (2018) will be examined to validate the central roletask-based teaching will play in this course, and the book ‘Task-Based LanguageTeaching’ by Nunan (2004) will be a very convenient and pragmatic reference asit gives not only comprehensive instructions and principles for applying thispractice — such as the six steps to introduce tasks and seven principles forclassroom teaching — but also concrete language teaching units and illustrativeexamples. Another similar book ‘Task-based Language Teaching and Learning’ (Ellis2003) can also be drawn upon as a good supplement to the previous one, withconcepts such as the four factors of tasks.

Corporacan make the language materials in this course more informed, and helpdistinguish the subtleties of different words in different contexts, as simplyengaging with English cannot guarantee that we notice and comprehend everythingabout the language (Sinclair 1987). The problem in L2 — less language exposurecompared with L1— can be well treated with selective concentrated languageexamples derived from corpora. Corpora can be directly used in my courseaccording to Leech (1997) in three ways, among which ‘exploiting to teach’ —using corpora to teach language — is more relevant. The idioms in this coursewill be informed by the work by Rafatbakhsh andAhmadi(2019), which compiled acollection of the most common idioms from COCA and divided them into semanticcategories, a feature which caters to the topical units of the syllabus.

Thoughthe study done by Schmitt, N. and Schmitt, D. (2020) corroborated that manyerrors made by English learners were attributable to L1, L1 can be instrumentalin teaching some vocabulary, such as cognates, loanwords and other words thatare difficult to explain in English yet whose concepts are clear in L1.Hermini’s article (2019) evaluating the use of L1 in various teachingactivities validated that L1 can be conducive to a better learning outcome ifL1 is used appropriately; this work will be further scrupulously examined toinform the use of L1 in teaching.

TheTarget context

Thecontext that this course is aimed at are large international cities in China.The reason why Chinese students can benefit most from this course is that therewill be a large number of Chinese cultural references used to make classes moreengaging; meanwhile, their L1 — namely Chinese — will be used appropriately tominimize the difficulty of understanding some target vocabulary by activatingtheir existing concepts learned in L1, as supported by Hermini (2019). Thecities applicable include primarily first-tier cities, as those cities areteeming with foreigners who can speak English but not Chinese, and they can bea very good motivator for students to learn English for daily use rather thanfor exams; but students in other cities can still stand to benefit from thiscourse, as the internet — providing authentic TV shows, movies and otherEnglish videos — is accessible almost everywhere in China.

Thereason why there is a need for this course lies in a tricky problem in schooleducation —almost everything is learned for exams. For example, English examsare not based on the purpose of testing communication ability in English, butrather testing students’ memory of words and grammar. As an individual teacher,changing the whole education system set up by senior officials in the educationministry is too ambitious. However, I do believe that it is vitally importantto open a gateway to more ‘real’ English for those who are keen on learningEnglish to communicate. Hence, I design this course in order to accommodatethose more aspirational English learners.

Thetarget institutions are private training companies, rather than public schools.As I mentioned earlier, the exams take precedence over everything else inpublic schools, so it would be exceedingly difficult for teachers there to fitthis course into their curriculum. In the meantime, because I plan to pursue acareer in private institutions as a continuation of my work from before I cameto the UK for my postgraduate degree, I would very much like to link myvocabulary course to this field. Furthermore, as this course is more suitableto keener learners — only a fraction of the learners’ population — and it iscomplementary to school education, private training institutions where studentscan choose when they have their classes (in reality, mainly weekends) better meetthese requirements.

Asfar as the target students are concerned, a few factors were considered.Firstly, the students should be mature enough to have their own devices withaccess to the Internet so that they can have access to the vast amount ofEnglish learning materials, chiefly English videos, and to comprehend the plotsof a wide range of TV shows and movies as their otherwise lack of comprehensionmay obstruct their learning. Neither of these conditions can be met by primaryschool and below students; accordingly, the target students should be at leastin junior high school. The next factor is vocabulary size and grammar. A smallvocabulary size is not going to help yield as many benefits as largervocabulary sizes. According to the textbooks used in the first-tier cities,students at the end of year 7 and year 8 can have vocabulary sizes of around1000 and 1500-word families respectively; the grammar learned as of this stageis sufficient to engage in daily English. Hence, this course is better suitedfor year 9 students and above, who already have decent vocabulary sizes.Another consideration is the availability of free time. Senior high schoolstudents may have better vocabulary, but they are more occupied with theirschool work so as to be admitted to good universities, which is a very highstakes situation. Overall, this course is most accommodating to junior highschool students in year 9; however, taking into account the practical issuesconcerned above, senior high school students and university students can also benefitfrom this course as long as the former can spare some time and the latter arewilling to.

Proposed needs analysis

Theaims of this course are based on my perceptions developed from my teachingexperiences, as I taught students from year 7 to year 9; but it is stillnecessary to initiate a needs analysis to complement what I perceived. I willuse questionnaires to do a needs analysis, because Cohen, et al. (2011) andDörnyei (2003) stated that questionnaires allow for a more structured format sothat it is more time-saving for the subjects and easy for coding. The mainsections in the survey — referring to Long (2005) and Basturkmen (2010) — willcover: the accessibility of English TV shows and movies and students’motivation to enjoy them, what is the students’ ideal English proficiency andin what scenarios English will be used, students’ current strengths andweaknesses in English, and students’ preferences of the topics, formats, andfrequency of the lessons.

Thequestionnaire will include both closed and open questions, and the format willentail multiple-choice questions, rank ordering questions, and rating scalequestions. The subject will be teachers who have been working in the targetinstitution teaching secondary students for at least 1 year. They will answerthe surveys according to their perceptions and records of the students’performance in exams, the students’ class performance, and the teachers’personal contact with the students. The data will be collected to principallyanalyse the more academic students’ needs and adjust or fine-tune the coursedesign correspondingly.

Thiscourse also needs to evaluate and adapt textbooks. The materials evaluation,based on the internal factors for adaptation (McDonough & Shaw 2003), willinclude the following dimensions: the matching of the aims of textbooks andthis course, the similarity between the intended contexts of the textbooks andthis course, the appropriateness of the cultural factors and the topics, thelogic of the order of activities provided, the degree to which the language inthe materials is up-to-date, the proportion of formulaic language such asphrasal verbs and idioms and how common it is, the lexical selections regardinglevels and frequency, the acceptance of the users and the reviews. Adaptationswill be made accordingly, guided by the three categories of adaptations(McGrath 2013) — ‘omission, addition and change’.

Syllabus and rationale

Thiscourse will adopt a topical-lexical syllabus. The justification of alexical-related syllabus lies in two aspects. To begin with, this course isdesigned to principally teach vocabulary, and all vocabulary will be embeddedin authentic language texts written by native English speakers, or directlyfrom English spoken or written corpora, to offer contexts for vocabularyacquisition. In addition, the course also entails a quantity ofvocabulary-based parameters, such as roots and affixes. Both characteristicsmake this course more suitable for a lexical syllabus. However, due to a needto learn a large amount of vocabulary applicable to various real-life contexts,and because of the facilitating effect of thematic clustering (Tinkham 1997),the course also needs to adopt a topical syllabus.

Elementsof other syllabi are likely to occur in this course as well. Since this courseintends to, aside from learning vocabulary, develop student’s speaking skills,some parts of the speaking skills based syllabus will be used. Some activitiesfrom the task-based syllabus will also be utilized to allow for languageacquisition and expand their speaking skills, from student-to-studentinteraction and negotiation of meaning.

The selection of content and grading will be done according to the following specifications. The target vocabulary for each unit will be derived from published articles, graded readers, articles from renowned and well-acknowledged textbooks, major English corpora, and other reliable and authentic sources. The grading will generally comply with the frequency from high to low, but being graded only by frequency may pose a hindrance to the incorporation of contexts. This grading, therefore, should be in conjunction with other criteria, such as the degree to which the target words are thematically related.

Practical and Theoretical Benefits

Thepractical benefits of this course, apart from the aims of this course — enablingthe students to enjoy English TV shows and movies and engage in conversationsin English more fluently — include pushing the students to better integrate thedifferent components of the English language — lexis, grammar points,pronunciation — into a complete communication instrument, and offering goodself-study methodology like using corpora to learn the depth of vocabulary.

Thetheoretical benefits are abundant. One of them is to make the students alwaysaware that the overarching function of languages is to pass on meaning. Anotheris the inspiration that knowledge of the selected roots and affixes can providethe students, as through understanding the origins and evolution of lexis, theycan begin to see English words from a new perspective and feel motivated toachieve high levels of English proficiency. The last one is much grander — toprovide an example of effective English teaching, informing prospective reformsin English education in China.

Conclusion

Overall,this course will be a distinctive one with outstanding teaching methodology andmaterials, but the ultimate goal is still to benefit the students. As therewill be more and more exposure to English with accessible Internet and more andmore international people travelling to or living in Chinese metropolitancities, this course will serve as a catalyst for the students’ thriving in anincreasingly interconnected and internationalised context.

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