Language Curriculum Development Concept

What language curriculum development concept is?

The concept of language curriculum development involves wide range of planning and implementation processes in developing or renewing new curriculum. Developing curriculum is defined as revising the old curriculum with the new curriculum without changing the former of curriculum's shape. Then, renewing curriculum means making a new curriculum by replacing the old curriculum with the new one. In Indonesia, the changing of curriculum had happened four times in 1975, 1984, 1996, and 2006. 

To make it clear, there is an example referring to the developing curriculum terminology. 

A (as old curriculum) and B (as new curriculum) 

By using development of curriculum, both A and B are merged into AB. Then, AB has the curriculum characteristic of the both A and B. 

Curriculum A is replaced with Curriculum B to renew curriculum. B does not posses the characteristic of A curriculum. 

There are seven processes/ procedures/ steps of the development curriculum as following: 

1. Needs analysis;  It means knowing for what purpose curriculum is made by collecting information about what the learners’ need in learning process and it has objective reality which is waiting for to identify and analyze. The main purpose of needs analysis is assessing, determining, identifying, and collecting students’ needs in order to know what they able to do and need to be able to do. The analysis is often used by curriculum officers, teachers, learners, writers and testing personnel. In addition, the analysis should be done by practicing several procedures like questionnaires, self ratings, interviews, meetings, observation, collecting learner language samples, task analysis, case studies and analysis of available information. All of these procedures are resulted in a group of information which is summarized and is ranked. For example, a student wants to have private English lesson. In needs analysis, we should know for what purpose his/her study is. moreover, for instance, the study is to prepare him/her to study abroad in America or we called it academic study. Then, in needs analysis we should give him/her a lesson about reading, speaking, and writing. In reading, for example, the students can find the main idea; can summarize the text, so on. 
2. Situation analysis; It means that situation determines the result of the curriculum success. It, however, has a purpose to identify key factors that might positively or negatively affect the implementation of a curriculum plan.  there are six factors in situational analysis as follows: (a) Societal factors: This factor involves teaching policy, reasons, community, tradition and public point of view about foreign language; (b) Project factors: it relates in projects’ management, goals and procedures, members experience, project time and group; (c) Institutional factors: it involves in institutional leadership, schools’ physical resources, staff morale, teachers problems, and institution determination; (d) Teacher factors: it relates in teachers’ typical background, beliefs, proficiency, teaching loads and resources; (e) Learners factor: involves in learners’ language experience, motivation, expectation, types whether homogeneous or heterogeneous, and their preferable learning approach; (f) Adoption factor: it relates to curriculum's’ advantages, efficiency and effectiveness.
3. Planning learning outcomes; It means that, before you do learning process, you should define what outcomes it should be or we can say the goal of learning activities. Not only planning the goals but also the objective too. The goal has wider meaning than objective. Goal is a description of the general purpose of a curriculum and is gathered during need analysis. In addition, planning the goals has an effect to improve learners’ motivation and teaching effectiveness. Then, an objective is defined as a statement of specific changes a program seeks to bring about and results from an analysis of the aim into its different components which has the following criteria as following: describing learning outcome, consistent with the aim, precise, and feasible. For example, the goal is to read a description or narration text in reasonable time. Then, the objective is the learners can get information within the text.
4. Course organization; The course organization involves in choosing the correct course book which is corresponded with the aim and suited the teaching learning process. In addition, the organization relates in its components, content organized and sequenced, grading and progression, recycling and revision, grammar reference and the clearness of the layout.
5. Selecting and preparing teaching materials; Teaching material is any tools used by the teacher to facilitate language learning. Language learning is learn to use language in communicative way both speech (listening and speaking) and writing (reading and writing). There are four kinds of teaching material as follows: printed material (book, worksheet, dictionary, encyclopedia, photo, etc), recorded material (cassette and radio), audiovisual material (television, computer, video, etc), and Real / concrete things (building, animal, plant, student, park, etc); 
6. Providing for effective teaching; To provide the effective teaching the teacher should aware of the following factors like knowing the aims and approaches, have the design and organization, good language content, all lesson skills are covered, the topic is relevant, the appropriate methodology, teacher book types whether comprehensive or supportive and another practical consideration. When the teacher can cover all of these factors, then the teaching process will be effective and efficient.
7. Evaluation; After finishing the number 1 until 6 above, we need an evaluation procedure. The evaluation process/procedure only evaluates learning program from beginning to the end of the learning process to see whether the program succeed or not.

Based on the writing above, it can be concluded that seven procedures can be used as united of tools to create a proper language curriculum in any educational institution. This study of language curriculum development contributes much benefits for profession in teaching, not only in theory but also in practice. 

The profession of teaching involves some aspects as following: 

1. Profession of teaching has important function;  
2. Profession of teaching needs a great deal of skill and ability;  
3. Profession of teaching posses clear background of knowledge;  
4. The knowledge is learned on specified time of universities;