chapter 5

Richards, J. (2001). Planning goals and learning outcomes. In Curriculum development in language teaching (pp. 112-144). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

In planning a language curriculum planners look at the long term goal of the learners including: academic rationalism (justifications behind teaching a language), social and economic efficiency (looking at the needs of learners including economic needs of a society), learner-centeredness (looking at the individual needs of a learner), social reconstructionism (empowering learners by making them aware of the social injustices and acting on them), cultural pluralism (that other cultures are just as important as the dominant culture). The curriculum should also include aims or goals, and objectives or learning outcomes specifying the goals of the program.
The chapter describes in detail of how a language curriculum should entail, which makes me want to investigate the curriculum of our Yup’ik program. Do the outcomes include the non language outcomes like the thinking skills? When I was reading about the social and economic factors, I was reminded of one outcome that I read somewhere. The statement was that a child will have more job opportunities that deal with the Yup’ik language.