Types of Syllabus

Notions are meaning elements that may be expressed through nouns, pronouns, verbs, prepositions, conjunctions, adjectives or adverbs. Notions are general concepts such as, “time, space, cause and effect.”

A notional-functional syllabus is based on the premise that communication is a meaningful behavior in a social and cultural context that requires creative language use rather than synthetic sentence building.

Often, this syllabus is built around certain topics and themes, such as: Travel, drugs, religious Persuasion, advertising, modern architecture, sport as so on.

The topic-based textbook units start with a variety of exercise that stimulates student interest in the theme and develop the student’s ability to manipulate the language appropriate to the situation and use the language of the theme.

The task-based content consists of activities that the learners have to do for non-instructional purposes outside of the classrooms. The content of the situations is provided by the students themselves.

1. Procedural Syllabus
Task-based syllabus is designed with the concept that, while the conscious mind is working out some of the meaning-content, some subconscious part of the mind perceives, abstracts or acquires as a step in the development of an internal system of rules

2. Process Syllabus
A Process Syllabus addresses the overall question: 'Who does what with whom, on what subject- matter, with what resources, when, how, and for what learning purpose(s)?'

3. Skill-Based Syllabus
The term “skill” in language teaching is used as a specific way of using language that combines structural and functional ability but exists independently of specific settings or situations.

The content-based syllabus is the teaching of content or information with little effort to teach the
language itself separately from the content being taught.

The theory of language assumed by content-based syllabus embraces the full range of communicative competence, including a structural component, sociolinguistic and discourse competence and strategic competence.

The cornerstone of this type of syllabus is vocabulary.

Grammar, in lexical syllabuses is connected to the different patterns of words, expressions of notions and functions.

Is a syllabus in which the contents are organized according to situations in which certain language is likely to be employed.

Limbo: Specific setting of the situation is of little or no importance. What is important is the particular language focus involved.

Concrete: Situations are enacted to specific settings and the language associated with it.

Mythical: Situations depend on a fictional cast of characters in a fictional place.

It is a syllabus which specifies the semantic-grammatical categories (e.g., frequency, motion, and location) and the categories of communicative function that learners need to express.

In short, it is centered around communication (i.e. meaning, convention, appropriacy, interaction and structure).

Relational syllabus is based on items like "notional relations such as cause-effect; or discourse relations, such as question-reply.

A relational syllabus, like grammatical and notional/functional syllabuses, would seem only to account for certain parts of the total linguistic system.