For context, I’m attempting to build an ‘academic English syllabus’ for an international school. I initially set out to create suitable alternatives to coursebook-driven provision, or to at least suggest enhancements to that model. Am I getting anywhere, or am I suddenly drifting towards coursebooky modelling anyway? Hmmm – such is the danger when you’re a coursebook author yourself I guess!

Today’s focus is on subskills. In Part 1, I mentioned how I’d devised a set of core Can-Do descriptors for the syllabus. These were taken directly or synthesised from three main sources: The Bell Framework of Assessment, WIDA, and CEFR. I created this for the four typical skills, plus communicative competences and, importantly, plurilingual competences. 

A snapshot of one descriptor list for reading:

When it comes to actually mapping a syllabus, these overriding descriptors aren’t enough. They are a broad capability that learners will demonstrate, but they are not a set of specific skills that need to be developed in order to demonstrate those capabilities. Sorry if obvious, but just for clarity:

Overall capability: recognising main ideas

Sub-skill: recognising essential and non-essential info, noticing and understanding discourse markers, etc

The tasks/learning sequences we derive for the syllabus will enable learners to develop those sub-skills, and in turn the capability as a whole. 

What was the starting point for defining the subskills?

Well, first we need to look at the framework of the overriding curriculum, and assess what the phase-level goals are (with focus on language development). That meant reviewing this document:

Note: in case you are unfamiliar with Key Stages in England

• Key Stage 2: ages 7-11, school years 3-6
• Key Stage 3: ages 11-14, school year 7-9

While it’s not the first time I’ve looked at this doc and thought ‘hmmm…’, trying to use this framework for syllabus design was double ‘hmmm’. The level of granularity in it fluctuates so much across key stages. The level of detail for KS2 English is pretty good, and there are even target word lists in it, and I’ll factor the Year 5 and 6 one into the mix for our vocab coverage. For KS3 though, the guidance feels more general, and is bulked out by a huge glossary of linguistic terms everyone needs to know. 

With AI-assistance I tried to draw out some tangible subskills from this doc and some accompanying rubrics, but I hit stumbling blocks:

• It was much easier to derive subskills from KS2 criteria, but I’m pitching the syllabus at KS3
• The KS3 guidance was fine for matching with my general set of Can-Do statements, but I felt on my own for developing subskills
• This was hugely the case when considering listening development. Look at this guidance:

I mean, it assumes teachers know how to teach listening skills, and doesn’t really dig into more granular listening skills development. The other day I was ranting about the lack of listening focus in these oracy drives in international schools. Well, I’m not surprised after reviewing this framework doc tbh. Overall it’s just a bit general, and there are a lot of implicit assumptions made, put it that way. Feeding in some subject-specific guidance from schools helped I think.

Anyhow, I ended up leaning more on KS2 than I’d expected. I justified this by suggesting that in this context they were foundational. Whoa – AI went for me on that! It seems to have built up a pretty good picture of my views on multilingualism, and started calling me out on the deficit-sounding nature of that term. Fair play, AI. But still, we did consider the KS2 criteria for the subskill architecture on the basis that KS3 would be building on that. 

The amount of gaps though. AI really started to hallucinate when I was building listening subskills as it had nothing to go on. I had a meltdown, and was like ‘right! I’ve had enough! We need something more tangible than this woolly guidance!’. AI softly muttered ‘how about following a coursebook syllabus?’ So I closed the tab for an hour.

Where did I go from there?

Then I contemplated leading with tasks and backwards-defining my subskills. I scrapped that as the subskills did feel somewhat predictable – I just hadn’t given AI the right guidance yet.

I decided that we needed to layer in some principles of genre-based approaches, especially for the writing descriptors. I didn’t want these to be all about structure, which was what happened alot when I pulled from the Curriculum Framework only. We devised criteria from summaries of sources like Rose and Martin (2012) on SFL. For speaking, I fed in the Voice 21 framework and some broader guidance that we’d sourced on that. 

Things started to look up, and the subskills we were shaping started to read much better to me (in principle). However, it felt like they needed a proper audit against an established language development framework. You know where I’m going with this…

The audit

I bit the bullet and used the CEFR companion volume full descriptor list. I audited our devised list of subskills against CEFR, and planned to use it to plug gaps in the listening set. Things became A LOT EASIER. But something else became apparent.

 The relevant sub-skills we’d been defining were now based on these sources:

– DfE KS2, DfE KS3, Voice 21, SLF influenced ideas, user-own guidance…

And they often aligned with existing CEFR descriptors, IF audited for semantic similarity:

And the matches we identified from the CEFR searchable descriptors varied wildly across CEFR level. Well, to teachers this is obvious. We are often asking learners to perform tasks in mainstream classrooms that are *technically* above their proficiency level, hence requiring lots of scaffolding etc. Yet that’s what they need to navigate in that moment. Developing the subskills they actually need seems more relevant than just filtering this CEFR descriptor set to, say, A2 and populating the subskills for our syllabus. 

This long-winded description puts us here:

• 194 subskills across Reading/Viewing, Writing, Speaking/Oracy, Listening
• Crossover with their origins… Combinations of the following: 

The list is epic, and I’ll audit it down I think. For example (from Reading subskills, yes they need R1.X IDs…):

In R1 here, I might merge a couple of these. That said, they are all technically different.

I love R2.4, the cross-referencing visual and prose info. Very useful and relevant!

Anyhow, the next step will be a very human audit, AI has done… okay with this one but I think it was a big and important step.

Am I pleased that I didn’t draw directly from CEFR in the first instance here? Yes because then we get to lead with the curriculum framework first, and gather influences from elsewhere – and we end up with R2.4 type subskills out of it.

What about the other competences?

Oh yeah! Well, communicative competences was sort of engulfed here into the writing, listening and speaking/oracy subskills. Plenty of crossover. 

As for the plurilingual competences, well, they were easy to draw directly from the CEFR (snapshot):

Although they need a thorough check still.

Anyhow, these can be used a bit differently I think – they will most certainly form part of the teacher notes on lesson resources, to nudge teachers towards multilingual practices. And, where possible, embed as skills to explicitly practice – we’ll see how that works out at mapping.

Exactly WHAT makes these subskills potentially better than those used in an existing coursebook?

To answer that, I think we have to compare what we have with one of the better coursebooks out there – Lift. I don’t have their subskills list though, noooo! But I do have information on their curriculum design…

• The skills coverage in Lift only ‘correlates’ with Common Core Standards, and WIDA. It is not derived directly from curricular focused skills in the first instance, or from EAL-aligned descriptors. As a result, you get lines like this in the Lift correlation docs, that show coverage of certain standards is skewed:

• In contrast, I have led with the curriculum framework (ENC) in devising my subskills. I shaped them from it. In theory anyway.
• Lift has a strong correlation with WIDA according to a review of their coursebook (well 4 units of one). However, the review skews evidence in favour of Lift. When you read the evidence:

Asset-based approaches like translanguaging have not been directly addressed in any part of the resource and it is the responsibility of teachers to apply these (I guess based on what they know?). Despite this…

Lift was deemed as strongly and comprehensively aligning with Big Ideas on Equity, Opportunity, and Access.

• By building our own syllabus which embeds the development of plurilingual competences, we can truly make multilingualism an asset by design, rather than relying on teacher expertise to tap into it.

This honestly isn’t a criticism of Lift, I’m just saying. If we approach syllabus design with better curriculum alignment and asset-based approaches in mind from the outset, then we could potentially create a product more fit for purpose.

Anyhow, unit outlines next I think…

Categories: General, materials writing, teacher development

Tags: eal, education, ESL, international school, National Geographic Learning, skills development, syllabus design, teaching, WiDA