Goals and Objectives

GOALS AND OBJECTIVES

1. Goals

 Program goals are defined in this book as general statements concerning desirable and attainable program purpose and aims based on perceived language and situation needs. In deriving goals from perceived needs, four points should be remembered:

1.      Goals are general statements of the program’s purpose.

2.      Goals should usually focus on what the program hopes to accomplish in the future, and particularly on what the students should be able to do when they leave the program.

3.      Goals can serve as one basis for developing more precise and observable objectives.

4.      Goals should never be viewed as permanent, that is, they should never become set in cement.

The process of defining goals makes the curriculum developers and participants consider, or reconsider, the program’s purposes with specific reference to what the student should be able to do when they leave the program.

2. Objectives

If curriculum goals are defined as statements of the desirable and attainable curriculum purposes and aims based on the perceived language and situation needs of the participants in a program. Instructional objectives will be defined here as specific statements that describe the particular knowledge, behaviors, and/or skills that the learner will be expected to know or perform at the end of a course or program. Direct assessment of the objectives at the end of a course will provide evidence that the instructional objectives, and by extension the program goals, have been achieved, or have not been achieved.

From Goals Toward Objectives

Developing statements of perceived needs into program goals, and these in turn into clear objectives, is an effective way to clarify what should be going on in the language classroom. Once having thought through what will be taught in each classroom, planners can make efforts to coordinate across courses and throughout an entire language program.

Logically, this process of restating needs in terms of program goals and then breaking them down into precise instructional objectives will begin with a careful examination of the needs of the students as discovered in any available needs analysis or program description documents.

In other situations the perceived needs may be specified in great detail. As a result, the detailed needs may have to be classified and coliapsed into general categories before they can be expressed as general course or program goal.

Getting Instructional Objectives on Paper

Working out the goals and objectives of a program based on the perceived needs of the students can be an interesting and productive process in itself. However sooner or later, the results of these efforts must be formalized and written down.

Sources of Ideas for Objective

A number of sources are available to help formulate objectives from the goals of a program. These include other programs and their curriculum, the books and journals that constitute the language teaching literature, and educational taxonomies that were worked out as far back as the 1950.

Other Language Programs

Sometime during the process of formulating goals and objectives, or earlier during the needs analysis stage, letters can and should be written to similar programs. Any statements of goals and objectives or any course descriptions that those programs are willing to share can be very useful. Redundancy of effort will be avoided, and new creative ideas for student needs, goals, and objectives may come to light.

The Literature

Other sources of ideas for filling out the goals and objectives in a program are the numerous published accounts of similar efforts around the world. Examination of the books and journals devoted to language teaching, especially with an eye for topics like needs analysis, goals and objectives, and curriculum development, will lead to the realization that language teachers have been working on these issues for years.

Taxonomies

In sorting through all the information on students' needs, and program goals and objectives, the kinds of factors you are dealing with in language learning programs can be grouped into two very broad categories. In a language program, the cognitive domain appropriately refers to the kinds of language knowledge and language skills the students will be learning in the pro- gram. In other words, any cognitive goals in language teaching might better be termed language goals, that is, the language learning content of the program.

The affective domain refers to those aspects of learning that are related to feelings, emotions, degrees of acceptance, values, biases, and so forth. Affective goals would be those goals in a program that are designed to alter or increase such affective factors. Consider the idea of happiness. Affective domain objectives may not necessarily be stated in a form that describes performance, conditions, and criterion as suggested by Mager for instructional objectives.

As I pointed out previously, Mager (1975) suggested three components necessary for the formation of good objectives:

1.      Performance. An objective always says what a learner is expected to be able to do.

2.      Conditions An objective always describes the important conditions (if any) under which the performance is to occur.

3.      Criteria. Wherever possible, an objective describes the criterion of acceptable performance by describing how well the learner must performance is to occur perform in order to be considered acceptable.

Subject

While it may seem like quibbling to specify subject as an element of an objective, it is necessary in order to stress the importance of thinking of objectives in terms of what the students, learners, or workshop participants will be able to do at the end of the course, program, or workshop. The subject will not always be the same in every situation. In fact, the objectives I stated at the beginning of the last section referred to what the readers would be able to do by the end of this chapter.

 Performance

The focus of language objectives should be on what the learners can do with the language. This can-do focus is remarkably consistent with contemporary notions of language teaching, wherein the central concern is with helping students to communicate in the language when they are finished with their training.

Conditions

Thinking through what the students must be able to perform is useful, but often the clarification of what it means "to perform" will only occur when the conditions that surround the performance are described.

Measure

The key to the measure part of an objective is to ask how the performance will be observed or tested. In the objective described above, the students' performance on the objective could be verified by observing that they are able to write the correct words in the blanks provided. Thus, the measure is that part of objective that states how the desired performance will be observed

Criterion

Stating the level of accuracy that will be considered sufficient to succeed (or pass) on a given objective can be problematic. Unfortunately, there are only "rules of thumb" to go by in setting such levels

Pros and Cons of Curriculum Objectives

The idea of instructional objectives evolved from the belief that educational institutions could be made more effective if human enterprises could be analyzed scientifically. The preparation of students for various human endeavors could then be provided systematically in school curriculum.

 Mager (1962) provided a definition for instructional objectives by specifying the three essential characteristics performance, conditions, and criteria. The number of characteristics has been expanded in this book to include subject, performance, conditions, measure, and criterion (perhaps because of my language teacher compulsion for complete sentences including subject, verb, and object).

Objectives Trivialize Instruction

Another criticism raised about objectives is that they trivialize education by forcing teachers to focus only on things that can be expressed as objectives. Like so many criticisms of objectives, the trivialization charge is an argument against a position that no sensible educator would ever take.

Objectives Curtail a Teacher's Freedom

The charge has also been leveled that objectives interfere with the teacher's freedom, in particular, with the teacher's freedom to respond to problems and ideas that arise spontaneously out of the process of teaching.

Objectives Do not Bite

Of course, in the hands of the educational equivalent of Darth Vader, objectives would be rigid, narrowly defined, restrictive, and dangerous. In general, however, people who advocate and use objectives inhabit the same planet as those who do not.

Other benefits that can be derived from the use of objectives include the following

1.      Objectives help teachers to convert the perceived needs of the students into teaching points.

2.      Objectives help teachers to clarify and organize their teaching points.

3.      Objectives help teachers to think through the skills and sub skills underlying different instructional points

4.      Objectives help teachers to decide on what they want the students to be able to do at the end of instruction.

5.      Objectives help teachers to decide on the appropriate level of specificity for the teaching activities that will be used

6.      Objectives help teachers by providing a blueprint for the development of tests and other evaluation instruments (see Chapter Four).

7.      Objectives help teachers to adopt, develop, or adapt teaching materials that maximally match the students' needs (see Chapter Five)

8.      Objectives help teachers to develop professionally by letting them focus on just what it is that they are trying to accomplish in the classroom (see Chapter Six).

9.      Objectives help teachers to evaluate each learner's progress, as well as overall program effectiveness, by permitting the systematic study modification, and improvement of their perceptions of students needs, course objectives, tests, materials, teaching, and evaluation procedures (see Chapter Seven).

10.  Objectives help teachers to contribute to and learn from an ongoing process of curriculum development that draws on the collective energy and strengths of all of the teachers in a program to lessen the load of each individual.

In order to realize all of these advantages and avoid the pitfalls, there are a number of points that should be remembered:

1.      Objectives can range in type and level of specificity.

2.       Objectives are not permanent. They must remain flexible enough to respond to changes in perceptions of students' needs and to changes in the types of students who are being served.

Though objectives will never be perfect, the act of trying to state course or program objectives will not only add structure to satisfying the students’ language needs, but will also help the program leadership and its teachers to think through what it means to teach language in all of its complexity. Objectives can be used to guide the teaching of language without interfering with the techniques and exercises chosen by the teacher in the classroom.

Reference

Brown, James.1995.The Elements Of Language Curriculum .Boston: Heinle and Heinle Publishers