Syllabus

Types of syllabi

1. Grammatical: a list of structures such as the present tense, comparison of adjectives, relative clauses. These are divided into sections graded according to difficulty/importance.
2. Lexical: list of vocabulary items (words and their different associations + idioms).
3. Grammatical-lexical: very common. Both structures and vocabulary are listed (together or in separate lists).
4. Situational: it teaches the language needed for each situation; headings refer to situations or locations such as ‘at the restaurant’ ‘at the shop’.
5. Topic-based: headings are topic-based, e.g. pollution, marriage, food.
6. Notional: general notions (number, time, place, colour) and specific notions (man, woman, afternoon à like voc. items).
7. Functional- Notional: giving orders, asking, requesting, giving directions, promising. Purely functional syllabi are not quite common, that’s why the functions are combined with notions.
8. Mixed or multi-strand: modern syllabi combine different aspects including specifications of topics, tasks, functions and notions along with structures and lexis.