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ESL & Applied Linguistics Professional
Language Curriculum Design
Crystal-clear and comprehensive yet concise, this text describes the steps involved in the curriculum design process, elaborates and justifies these steps, and provides opportunities for practicing and applying them. The description of the steps is done at a general level so that they can be applied in a wide range of particular circumstances. The process comes to life through plentiful examples of actual applications of the steps. Each chapter includes:
examples from the authors experience and from published research
tasks that encourage readers to relate the steps to their own experience
case studies and suggestions for further reading that put readers in touch with others experience
Curriculum, or course, design is largely a 'how-to-do-it' activity that involves the integration of knowledge from many of the areas in the field of Applied Linguistics, such as language acquisition research, teaching methodology, assessment, language description, and materials production. Combining sound research/theory with state-of-the-art practice, Language Curriculum Design is widely applicable for ESL/EFL language education courses around the world.
examples from the authors experience and from published research
tasks that encourage readers to relate the steps to their own experience
case studies and suggestions for further reading that put readers in touch with others experience
Curriculum, or course, design is largely a 'how-to-do-it' activity that involves the integration of knowledge from many of the areas in the field of Applied Linguistics, such as language acquisition research, teaching methodology, assessment, language description, and materials production. Combining sound research/theory with state-of-the-art practice, Language Curriculum Design is widely applicable for ESL/EFL language education courses around the world.
240 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2009
23 people are currently reading
142 people want to read
About the author
I.S.P. Nation
41 books39 followersPaul Nation is Emeritus Professor in Applied Linguistics at the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies (LALS) at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. His specialist interests are language teaching methodology and vocabulary learning. He supervises PhD research on vocabulary. He has taught in Indonesia, Thailand, the United States, Finland and Japan.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 12, 2021
I finished!
The last three chapters were a huge struggle. I'm sitting here in the car with my family and they are having interesting conversations and the road is loud so my mom keeps chiming in by raising her voice in my ear. If this were an interesting novel, I could ignore the conversations, the road, the chewing, and everything else, but this book is downright boring, so it took me nearly an hour to finish two chapters and I doubt very seriously that the information I read will actually stick in my brain for any length of time.
I didn't like this book. It's difficult to understand, not because the information is dense but because the authors don't explain themselves. They have a paragraph that presents information and them they have a table that presents the exact same information, and then they act as if they have explained everything down to the minutest details. They haven't. It's as if they said, a car runs off of a combustion engine, and then leave it at that. If you don't know what a combustion engine is, you don't understand the sentence. The book is full of stuff like that
You can evaluate your student's vocabulary by using vocabulary tools...ok...which ones? How do they work? What information do they tell you? For a book that goes on and on about reliability and validity, it doesn't explain how the things it promotes are reliable and valid.
This is not to say that this book is not practical. I think it's more practical than Understanding by Design was, it at least talks about how there isn't enough time to design the perfect curriculum and lists all of the problems likely to surface in the design process up to and including office politics. Or maybe rather than practical realistic would be a better word. This book is solidly realistic, dealing with real world problems brought on by real world people. It's just not very applicable. You aren't sure what to apply and how to apply it.
The authors quote a million people in here, but they expect their readers to have already read those people and so they never bother summarizing what they said or why these authors think it's important! It was so frustrating! They tell you to look at case studies for homework and then don't give you the case studies! Ridiculous.
Perhaps the most annoying part was the focus on vocabulary. So many lists. The 1000 most common list. The academic list. The 1000 most communicative list. Nobody learns a language by learning a list of words! You don't learn the most common words first, you learn whatever word that you associate the meaning to correctly first. My first word in Japanese was 'stop', it might be on the 1000 most common list, but it's not near the top. I didn't even learn it communicatively, I learned it because it was the easiest word to learn in context. My first word in Chinese was 'wife'. Worse than that, it's a word for wife that is non extant today. According to Nation and his lists, I shouldn't have learned this word. It is neither common nor communicative, but I learned it first. Why? Because it was easy to figure out by the context. That's how we learn our first language, not by learning lists. Why would second language acquisition be any different?
The last three chapters were a huge struggle. I'm sitting here in the car with my family and they are having interesting conversations and the road is loud so my mom keeps chiming in by raising her voice in my ear. If this were an interesting novel, I could ignore the conversations, the road, the chewing, and everything else, but this book is downright boring, so it took me nearly an hour to finish two chapters and I doubt very seriously that the information I read will actually stick in my brain for any length of time.
I didn't like this book. It's difficult to understand, not because the information is dense but because the authors don't explain themselves. They have a paragraph that presents information and them they have a table that presents the exact same information, and then they act as if they have explained everything down to the minutest details. They haven't. It's as if they said, a car runs off of a combustion engine, and then leave it at that. If you don't know what a combustion engine is, you don't understand the sentence. The book is full of stuff like that
You can evaluate your student's vocabulary by using vocabulary tools...ok...which ones? How do they work? What information do they tell you? For a book that goes on and on about reliability and validity, it doesn't explain how the things it promotes are reliable and valid.
This is not to say that this book is not practical. I think it's more practical than Understanding by Design was, it at least talks about how there isn't enough time to design the perfect curriculum and lists all of the problems likely to surface in the design process up to and including office politics. Or maybe rather than practical realistic would be a better word. This book is solidly realistic, dealing with real world problems brought on by real world people. It's just not very applicable. You aren't sure what to apply and how to apply it.
The authors quote a million people in here, but they expect their readers to have already read those people and so they never bother summarizing what they said or why these authors think it's important! It was so frustrating! They tell you to look at case studies for homework and then don't give you the case studies! Ridiculous.
Perhaps the most annoying part was the focus on vocabulary. So many lists. The 1000 most common list. The academic list. The 1000 most communicative list. Nobody learns a language by learning a list of words! You don't learn the most common words first, you learn whatever word that you associate the meaning to correctly first. My first word in Japanese was 'stop', it might be on the 1000 most common list, but it's not near the top. I didn't even learn it communicatively, I learned it because it was the easiest word to learn in context. My first word in Chinese was 'wife'. Worse than that, it's a word for wife that is non extant today. According to Nation and his lists, I shouldn't have learned this word. It is neither common nor communicative, but I learned it first. Why? Because it was easy to figure out by the context. That's how we learn our first language, not by learning lists. Why would second language acquisition be any different?
January 4, 2018
Quite useful for learning about types of curricula and what materials to cover for language learners.
November 10, 2025
I recommend this book for my DELTA module 3 course because it provides a good overview of the steps involved in creating a curriculum. However as one of the other reviewers mentioned, it doesn't always explain itself as clearly as it could. Sometimes the authors assume a level of knowledge that I don't have even after many years of teacher training and doing a Masters. Having said that, it does provide a useful breakdown in the form of a diagram that is used throughout the whole book, and it's interesting to think about how teachers enact curriculum every day in chapter towards the end of the book.
January 21, 2025
Highly recommended to anyone involved in the planning, creation, or revision of language curricula. This books cites a vast array of research and argues for a principled approach to the creation of language curricula.
Highly readable, and worth owning if you work or plan to work in this field.
Highly readable, and worth owning if you work or plan to work in this field.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews