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RUNNING HEAD: A New Language Curriculum Development in Costa Rica

A New Language Curriculum Development in Costa Rica

Will this new proposal be successful?
By Prof. Jonathan Acua Solano
Wednesday, August 26, 2015
Twitter: @jonacuso
Post 188

In July 2015 I attended a presentation where several curricular developers from

the Ministry of Education (MEP) in Costa Rica presented the new language curriculum
proposal for 2016. In spite of the fact that the new ELT program is rather ambitious if
compared to the one that is currently in use, the puzzling question that remains floating
in the air and pirouetting in the attendees minds (well at least in mine) is, how can this

great and earnest program can yield the CEF B2 mark they aspire?
Based on what we participants were explained regarding the new program, no
doubt, as suggested by Richards (2001), the curricular developers from MEP followed a
framework for their work. MEP developers must have considered the content for the new
program, the students needs, contextual factors inherent to our teaching scenario, the
nature of aims and objectives in the program, the planning of syllabi for each level,
material design techniques, and the program efficacy (Richards, 2001). Additionally, as

Prof. Jonathan Acua-Solano

A New Language Curriculum Development in Costa Rica

mentioned above, CEF standards and descriptors were also part of the planning of the
new ELT program for high school. But was all this enough?
How can good teaching be provided in a program? (Richards, 2001). How can
MEP authorites guarantee that the new program can yield the expected CEF level they
pursue? As explained by Richard-Amato (2003) and pointed out by Richards (2001), there
are several language teaching methodologies that have been in the learning scene for
over a hundred years. But somehow newbies, veteran instructors, as well as teachers
with just a few years of working for MEP continue to favor those ones that were popular
during the 70s and 80s though the Communicative Approach was born in the decade of
the 70s. A communication-oriented curriculum as the one proposed by MEP developers
cannot be functional as long as no agreement in CLT-oriented methodologies is agreed
by all teaching participants working for public high schools.
In a communicative methodology, content ceases to become some external
control over learning-teaching procedures (Breen & Candlin, 1979). The agreement over
content taught in class becomes crucial negotiations between learners and learners,
leaners and teachers, and learners and text (Breen & Candlin, 1979). If learning and
acquisition are meant to happen in our public high school classrooms, learning outcomes
in course syllabi cannot be simply written on stone or overlooked by negligent instructors
who are not that compromised with the philosophy behind the creation of this new
program that really looks remarkable if compared to former ELT programs at MEP and
impressive by the CEF language mastery standard that is intended to accomplish. If no
CLT approches to language teaching are used, this program is going to be as useless as
the one we have due to the lack of commitment from many MEP professionals.
To conclude, long held assumptions to language teaching must change to go
communicative. 1) Vocabulary and grammar are not the basic units of language. For
Richards (2001), the priority in planning was vocabulary and grammar and these were

Prof. Jonathan Acua-Solano

A New Language Curriculum Development in Costa Rica

seen as the main building blocks of language development. The new MEP proposal goes
beyond this way of seeing language instruction much more connected to a cognitive-code
approach as explained by Richard-Amato (2003), and if teachers do not understand this,
no real change will take place in the new program. 2) If new analyses were carried out,
learners in our MEP programs do not have the same exact needs. No doubt the fresh
programs intend to cope with different high school populations individually, and that
needs to stay like that; otherwise, the program will prove no good for CEF standards. 3)
Student needs cannot be simply identified as mere language needs. As Richards (2001)
suggests, instructors must teach learners how to solve their problems through English;
thus, the program will prove useful in the teaching of 21st Century skills needed today in
any kind of job students may hold in their future.

References
Breen, M., & Candlin, C. (1979). Essentials of a Communicative Curriculum. Applied
Linguistics, 1(2), 90-112.
Richard-Amato, P. (2003). From Grammatical to Communicative Approaches. In P.
Richard-Amato, Making it Happen (pp. 15-28). White Plains, NY: Pearson
Education.
Richards, J. (2001). Curriculum Development in Language Teaching. Cambridge, GB:
Cambridge University Press.

Prof. Jonathan Acua-Solano