A Novice’s Experience at

Designing a Course for Adults

3
M. Camino Bueno Alastuey

In 2002 the Public University of Navarre appointed me to design and teach

an English course for students from different programs that had had English
introduced as a compulsory subject. Due to my experience—I had been 39
teaching English at secondary schools and in master’s-level programs related
to marketing and commerce for more than ten years—I thought that this
new task would not be very demanding because I considered that hav-
ing enough experience teaching was enough to design a course. However,
designing a course for students enroled in two different programs, telecom-
munications and computer management, who had been placed in the same
English class in 2003, made me realise the challenge and the problems that
course design constitutes for novices.
The first problem I encountered was the difficulty of getting accounts of
specific language curriculum designs owing to the scarcity of the literature in
the field and the even rarer perspectives from people with few years of expe-
rience in designing. The great majority of books available have been written
by experts and the material is the product of many years of work. The
difficulties that I faced and the few perspectives from novices that I found
have motivated me to write this account of course design to encourage other
people who may be in the same situation and disheartened because all the
accounts are so skillful that they seem unattainable. It would be very useful
for people new in the field of English for specific purposes to have at their
disposal descriptions of the first steps of course design and of the improve-
ments and changes tried and made at the very beginning of the process.
 In this chapter, I first introduce the curricular context where the course
design fits. Second, I give a description of the course, the learners, and the
problems and challenges of language learning and teaching in my specific
context. Third, I explain the beliefs and assumptions on which the design
and the process of designing were based as well as the students’ assessment
and course evaluations. And fourth, I analyse and reflect on the process, the
results, the unplanned steps, the lessons learned, and the features that I plan
to change.

The Curricular Context

Spain has undergone a great change in foreign language teaching and learn-
ing in the past fifteen years. Schools have evolved from the predominance
of French in the 1980s, to the spread of English through all compulsory
education in the 1990s, to the introduction of second foreign languages in
primary and secondary schools in 2000. They have also moved from the
translation method to more communicative methodologies.
Developing a New Course for Adult Learners

In 1999 all the state members of the European community decided that
there should be a common framework that allowed for equivalences between
degree programs in different countries. This framework was called the Com-
mon European Framework (Council of Europe 2001), and it pointed to the
40
future importance of a good command of languages (especially English).
Later, during the European Year of Languages in 2001, it was agreed that
the knowledge of at least one foreign language was a necessity that would
be addressed at all levels of education, including the university level. In this
context, the administrators at the Public University of Navarre—a province
in the northeast of Spain—included English as a compulsory subject in six
of their technical degree programs (three years of instruction) and in one
degree program (four years) in 2002. The technical degree programs were
social work, work relations, agriculture, nursing, telecommunications sound
and image, and computer management; the four-year program was sociol-
ogy. The main purpose of English instruction was to provide students with
a general knowledge of the language to enable them to use it in their profes-
sional and personal lives.
English language instruction was included in these programs for four
reasons:
  1. The language centre at the campus—run by language teachers
with the status of technicians and not university teachers1—has

1
 This status means that they teach more hours for less money and face less rigorous require-
ments for the job and the selection process. In fact, the director of the centre decides who is
employed as he wishes, but at the university, there is a public competition for language teachers.
 been providing language services for current students, graduates,
and staff, and the demand is such (about two thousand students
enroled in English courses) that the centre cannot attend to all the
people who apply. The administrators assumed that there would be
less demand and that current students would not need the services
of the centre so much if compulsory English were part of the
courses.
  2. In a variety of surveys carried out to analyse student satisfaction
and how well the subjects taught in diploma and degree programs
meet the needs of the labour market, language training emerged
consistently as one of the most urgent demands from students and
prospective employers.
  3. The Common European Framework (Council of Europe 2001)
requires that universities adapt and create a system of easily read-
able and comparable diploma and degree programs with a common
system of credits. Adopting this common system involves changing

A Novice’s Experience at Designing a Course for Adults

Spanish credits—equivalent to ten hours of class per credit—to
the new European credits—equivalent to twenty-five to thirty
workload hours divided among class time, personal study, project
work, exams, and so forth per credit. To allow for mobility across
countries in the new European Common Space, languages have
41
become a must.
  4. The number of students is decreasing at the Public University
of Navarre, and to maintain student enrolment, the university
has to meet certain quality standards—established by centralised
bodies controlling all the processes of quality at university level in
Spain—and one of them will most likely be the number of subjects
taught in English. To enrol in those subjects, students would need
to know English.

In the academic year 2003–2004, English was made a compulsory subject

for the students enroled in two of the previously mentioned technical degree
programs: telecommunications sound and image, and computer manage-
ment. Students enroled in both degree programs were placed together in
an English course. This chapter describes the design process and the course
designed for the students enroled in these two careers following a common
course in the subject of English.

English for Computer Sciences

The course in which the students enroled was called English for Computer
Sciences because the only thing both degree programs had in common was
 the use of computers. I was the course designer and teacher. It was a one-
quarter course of forty-five hours of instruction from October to the end
of January (university courses in Spain are divided into two four-month
periods, the first from October to January and the second from February to
June). The learners were third-year undergraduates, who, placed in the same
class, would graduate at the end of the year. They were full-time students
with six or seven hours of class daily in addition to a lot of homework and
reports.
First, I found that the course definition was vague: the content was
described broadly as technical vocabulary, written and oral comprehension,
and expression in English. I was told that the students should reach an
upper intermediate level, but I had no guide as to how to do that. So I first
had to decide what to teach.
Second, the number of students was expected to be high because stu-
dents from the two degree programs had been placed together. Such a large
number of students meant that I would have to cater to different interests
and abilities. Third, in Spain learning languages at school is not a very
Developing a New Course for Adult Learners

positive experience for many students, who develop a strong belief (which
needs to be changed) in their inability to learn a foreign language. Although
the students are very conscious of their need for English in their future
professional life, they seem to resent having it as a compulsory subject, even
42
though they had demanded it.
Fourth, the facilities at the institution were not the most appropriate
for language teaching. The Public University is a very recent and modern
university with very good facilities for technical degree programs. However,
it lacks proper audio and video installations, and teachers have to take their
own audio players to the classrooms. The computer facilities, which are
very good, were rarely used for language instruction because teachers must
provide the programs and materials to be used and then an available techni-
cian has to try them out in the computer classrooms beforehand, a process
that takes too long to be repeated very often.
The last problem, which seems to be common to all the designers of
specific language courses (Flowerdew and Peacock 2001), was the lack of
collaboration on the part of subject teachers and coordinators. I asked them
by e-mail and, in some cases, personally to provide specific information
about the subjects they were teaching and which parts could be of interest
to be dealt with in the English course. The majority did not answer, and the
ones who did provided the titles of two or three books that were so long that
it would have taken the whole year to read them to prepare activities.
Considering all these problems, the greatest challenge I faced was to
design a course not knowing exactly how many students I would have,
their proficiency levels, their real needs, or even their or the administrators’
expectations; furthermore, I had to be prepared to change the course on the
spot as I identified students’ needs and attitudes in the classroom.

Course Design

The Syllabus
To plan the syllabus, I made four decisions based largely on my assump-
tions because I had very little information about the students. First, in the
language department we had decided that the compulsory courses should
focus on the language specific to the fields of knowledge of each degree
program and not on general English, so the topics and the vocabulary in
my course would focus on computing because the two degree programs had
this in common. Second, based on my experience teaching adult students,
I decided on a topic-based syllabus with reading, listening, and writing
developed within each topic. I made this decision because topics introduce

A Novice’s Experience at Designing a Course for Adults

language in real context, which allows for the creation of tasks that are based
on the topics that the students will deal with or have dealt with in their
specialties. Third, I had been told that I would have approximately forty
students in the class—which, considering the university’s 25 percent absence
rate, would mean about thirty students in class—so I planned highly com-
43
municative and interactive classes. Fourth, I wanted to select a book because
students like to have one so they can review and feel that they are progress-
ing as they do pages from the book.
Consequently, I evaluated some books and, since I thought the major-
ity of the students would be at the pre-intermediate or intermediate level
of English proficiency, experts in computing, and motivated to learn the
specific language of their future profession, I selected Oxford English for
Information Technology (Glendinning and McEwan 2002)—an upper inter-
mediate level book. The plan was to follow it, introducing some pronuncia-
tion exercises and activities to learn the New Academic Word List (Coxhead
2000). At this stage, I was quite happy with the choice of material because
it included a book with a topic-based syllabus that focused on developing
the selected skills, and I could supplement it as needed for pre-intermediate
students. I believe that syllabi should not be static but should be continually
revised and adapted to meet the needs of the students and the classroom
dynamics.
When I handed in the syllabus to the administrators in the Computer
and Telecommunications Departments, I thought the design was complete.
I was wrong. The first day of class fifty students showed up, and I learned
that fifteen more were planning to come to the following session. I admin-
istered a simple proficiency test, developed by the teachers at the university’s
 language centre. I also had students complete a needs analysis questionnaire
(see figure 1) to determine whether their perceived needs were the same as
the ones that had been predicted.
I had expected students to select reading and writing as their ­priorities,

Figure 1. Needs Analysis Questionnaire and Results

  1. Which area do you think you need to develop more?

a. Reading (54%)
— General (14%)
— Specific (28%)
b. Writing (60%)
— Letters (12%)
— E-mails (18%)
— Reports (specific) (60%)
c. Speaking (66%)
— General conversation (66%)
Developing a New Course for Adult Learners

— Technical discussions (40%)

— Presentations (36%)
d. Listening (80%)
— General conversation (80%)
— Presentations (26%)
44
  2. What do you think you need to develop in the area selected?
— Specific vocabulary (82%)
— Structures or grammar (54%)
— Practice (50%)
— Pronunciation (48%)
— General vocabulary (44%)
— Connectors (e.g., time, reason, consequence) (38%)
— Organisation of ideas (36%)
— Reference (e.g., demonstratives, pronouns) (18%)

  3. Which aspect of grammar, if any, would you like to study in class?

(Number your preferences)
a. Verb tenses (84%)
— Present simple, continuous and perfect
— Past simple, continuous and perfect
— Modals of ability
— Modals of permission
— Modals of deduction
— Modals of obligation
— Infinitive and gerund
— Verbs followed by infinitive or gerund
— Passive
continued on p. 45
 Figure 1 (cont.). Needs Analysis Questionnaire and Results

b. Phrasal verbs (72%)

c. Reported speech (70%)
d. Adverbs (66%)
e. Relative sentences (64%)
f. Conditionals (62%)
g. Articles (58%)
h. Comparatives and superlatives (54%)

  4. Would you like to learn

a. the most frequent words in English? (52%)
b. the most frequent academic words? (30%)
c. words for science and technology? (76%)

  5. Write a short summary of your experience and your expectations in this subject.
_____________________________________________________________

A Novice’s Experience at Designing a Course for Adults

_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
Note: Percentages indicate how many students chose each option.
45

and connectors, organisation of ideas, and reference as the areas they would
want to develop. As figure 1 shows, although the students wanted to develop
the four skills, they chose listening and speaking as their priorities, and
they were also interested in grammar. Maybe the questionnaire was not
an ­appropriate means to discover the students’ needs and should be modi-
fied, especially the section regarding the aspects of grammar to be covered
because it seemed to encourage grammar selection. However, the results for
speaking and listening were to be expected because they are the skills less
developed in high school and the most necessary in international profes-
sional contacts.
The fact that students selected vocabulary as an area of interest was not
surprising because they need specialised vocabulary to function in their
professional life. However, the fact that students selected grammar came as a
surprise, especially because of the high percentage of students who selected
the different aspects of grammar, though this result has been reported in
other courses (Brinton and Holten 2001). In my opinion, this result is due
to two factors that I had not foreseen: (1) students are used to grammar
syllabi and tend to follow and feel more confident with what they know;
and (2) the questionnaire was written in English and lack of proficiency in
 English may have prevented some students from stating different needs,2 or
it might have prevented them from understanding some of the statements
and, therefore, they may have stated as their main need what they recog-
nised: grammar.
From a level test I found out that the students ranged from beginning to
upper intermediate level in English proficiency: 32 percent were beginning
level, 16 percent postbeginning, 36 percent pre-intermediate, and 16 per-
cent intermediate and upper intermediate. This result meant that 84 percent
of the students were pre-intermediate or lower.
After analysing both the test and the questionnaire, I felt obliged
to modify the initial design because I did not want beginning or pre-
­intermediate level students to feel ignored if they could not follow an upper
intermediate course book with their limited language skills. In fact, 76 per-
cent of the class was at the beginning or low pre-intermediate level.
The real, and second, design of the course started at this point with all
the new data. I decided to change the structure of the classes, to concentrate
on skills development, and to introduce speaking activities in the sylla-
Developing a New Course for Adult Learners

bus—it had been the second skill most demanded so it had to be included if
the course was to fit the students’ perceived needs. I decided that the course
would devote thirty minutes weekly to each of the four skills, grammar, and
vocabulary; pronunciation would be included either in the listening or in
46
the speaking slot.
Because the class had too many students to allow for individual atten-
tion or interaction with the teacher, I paired them according to their level:
intermediate level students were paired with high beginning level students
and pre-intermediate with beginning level. At the same time, each student
had someone nearby at the same proficiency level. This arrangement enabled
the students to both teach and learn with students at or above their profi-
ciency level.
I also planned to use the book I had selected for written comprehen-
sion and oral expression exercises; to alternate it with a lower-level book for
oral comprehension; and to use material from other books for grammar,
pronunciation, and writing so that students from all levels would be doing
something appropriate to their proficiency level at least some time.
Once I had modified the initial design, I had to decide on the content
of the course considering the available time (only forty-five hours) and the
results of the questionnaire. Figure 2 shows the content that I decided to
focus on in the course.

2
 In some cases students do not recognise the way some needs are stated in their own
language and even less so in another language.
Figure 2. Content of the Course

Listening
• Listening for general and specific information
• Note taking
• Topics: computer applications, portable computers, computer networks,
multimedia, the Web, virtual reality
• Interviews: former student, ex-hacker
Grammar
• Verb tenses: present simple, past simple, continuous and perfect, the future,
modal verbs (present and past)
• Verbs patterns: infinitive, gerund
• Phrasal verbs
Reading
• Scanning and skimming, guessing words from context, making inferences
• Topics: online services, clipboard technology, graphical user interface,
multimedia, operating systems, security, mobile communication, the future of

A Novice’s Experience at Designing a Course for Adults

IT
Vocabulary
• Prefixes and suffixes
• Acronyms on the Web and in communications (from Net Lingo)
• “A New Academic Word List” (Coxhead 2000)
Pronunciation
• Vowels 47
• Diphthongs
• Consonants
• Stress and linking
• Weak forms
Speaking
• Role plays and games in all topics
• Practice of grammar points
Writing
• Verb agreement
• Displaced and dangling modifiers
• Fragments
• Run-ons
• Connectors of time, order, etc.
• Structure and organisation of ideas:
— Describing processes, functions, advantages and disadvantages, and systems
— Reporting a problem
— Writing a curriculum vitae
— Writing a summary
 Once I had decided on the content and the type of exercises in each sec-
tion, I had to decide how to distribute the workload. The course met twice
weekly, one hour on Mondays and two hours on Thursdays, so I decided to
work on listening/pronunciation and grammar on Mondays and reading,
vocabulary, writing, and speaking/pronunciation on Thursdays in thirty-
minute sessions devoted to each topic. After I distributed the time, I selected
exercises for about a month of class time, considering that I would evaluate
the material and activities during that period to see whether to continue
with the same type or modify them.
In fact, after two weeks, I changed some of the activities I had prepared
because the students were finding the classes too demanding. Most of the
texts were written by and for experts in computing, and the students did
not have the technical knowledge necessary to understand them so they had
to ask for explanations regarding content. They had problems with both
language and lack of content knowledge, which culminated in demotivation
and blockage from too much information in such a short period of time.
Since they had pointed out in the questionnaires that they also wanted to
Developing a New Course for Adult Learners

develop general language, I introduced general content texts to deal with

grammar as well as some oral activities and games. This change improved
the atmosphere and the dynamics of the class significantly.
So finally, after two modifications in the initial plan, the schedule for
48
the remaining quarter was determined, and with it the course design was
finished. (For a sample of the last sessions, see table 1.)

Activities and Sample Products

When designing the course, I intended it to prepare students for their future
professional life. Therefore, my general objective was to help them interpret
authentic texts and interact successfully with people in their professional
life. I also wanted to satisfy what the students identified as their main needs
so that they would perceive the course as useful. To fulfil the objectives and
the students’ needs, I thought that they would need all the skills in different
contexts and for different purposes.
Listening is essential for oral interaction as the students would find
themselves talking with professional contacts about computers or in confer-
ences and workshops about computers. Consequently, I included conversa-
tions and two lectures on computer-related topics with exercises to listen
for general and specific information and exercises to fill in the gaps with
technical vocabulary and phrasal verbs. I conducted both listening activities
at different levels because the students had mixed proficiency levels, and I
provided different questions for the same listening activity to develop the
low proficiency level students’ confidence.
The students had studied the majority of grammar points explained in
 Table 1. Course Schedule (Sessions 20 to 29)
Session Activities
20 Vocabulary: Work with words on the New Academic Word List
Speaking/pronunciation: Vowels o, o: and o:, :
Writing: Fragments (photocopies)
Homework: Reading from Oxford English for Information Technology
21 Vocabulary/writing: Create a story with words on the New Academic
Word List
Speaking/pronunciation: Consonants ʃ, tʃ, d
Speaking: Activities from Oxford English for Information Technology
Homework: Use of commas and run-on sentences (photocopies)
22 Listening: Virtual reality
Grammar: Modals aloud and I wish/If only
23 Reading: Activities from Oxford English for Information Technology
Vocabulary: Memory game with words from words on the New Academic
Word List

A Novice’s Experience at Designing a Course for Adults

Speaking/pronunciation: Consonants s, z
Writing: Connectors I
Speaking: Practice of grammar points covered and idioms
Homework: Test type from Internet page
24 Listening: Life of Bryan
Homework: Reading and suffixes
49
25 Reading: From Oxford English for Information Technology
Vocabulary: Exercises from the New Academic Word List
Writing: Dangling and misplaced modifiers
Speaking: Activities from Oxford English for Information Technology
Homework: Join words and translations from the New Academic Word
List, group 10
26 Listening: Ex-hacker 1
Grammar: Verbs followed by gerund and/or infinitive
Homework: From Oxford English for Information Technology
27 Reading: From Oxford English for Information Technology
Grammar: Linking
Writing: Connectors II
Speaking: Reporting
Homework: Exam Practice I
28 Listening: Ex-hacker 2
Homework: Phrasal verbs
29 All skills: Correction Exam Practice 1
Pronunciation: Review
Speaking: General
Note: The work in vocabulary is based on exercises designed by the teacher based on the New
Academic Word List (Coxhead 2000).
 class at high school, but they had forgotten much of what they knew after
two years without contact with English. I gave grammar exercises for home-
work and provided the corrections on the overhead projector during the
subsequent grammar session. I included grammar mainly because it was one
of the students’ perceived needs and including it provided reassurance.
Because the students had read some material in English for other sub-
jects, they had already worked on reading. However, they had to be prepared
to read authentic magazine articles, and the language in these articles is
quite different from that in textbooks. Therefore, I selected technical read-
ings from the book I had selected. The readings were authentic and from
specialised sources; nevertheless, I designed alternative exercises to concen-
trate on microskills and to make the textbook’s comprehension questions
easier because the students considered them too difficult.
Vocabulary is crucial for reading comprehension because lack of vocabu-
lary impedes it (Cobb and Horst 2001; Coxhead and Nation 2001). The
students had also expressed their need for it, so I designed exercises to work
with the different groups of the New Academic Word List (Coxhead 2000)
Developing a New Course for Adult Learners

as well as some others dealing with word formation. Figure 3 shows the ones
dealing with groups 1 and 2 of the New Academic Word List; I removed
all the words from Latin origin, which any Spanish speaker would easily
recognise. I also included tests on the Web for students to test themselves
50
outside of class on vocabulary, and every four weeks I gave a short test in
class to review vocabulary. I developed both the tests on the Web and the
short tests. The more times the students encounter a word, the more pos-
sibilities they have of learning it. In addition, I believe students should have
chances to test themselves to see their improvement and to revise what has
been learned.
Pronunciation is not usually taught in high school, but a basic knowl-
edge of sounds that do not exist in Spanish and the concept and practice
of weak forms are essential for recognizing the pronunciation of unknown
words from phonetic transcriptions as well as for improving recognition
and pronunciation. In their future professional life, students are likely to
encounter new words and have only the dictionary transcription to guide
their pronunciation. Spanish speakers also tend not to understand con-
versation because they expect to hear all the words, so awareness of how
phonemes and words are linked together in discourse is very useful. Figure 4
contains an example of one of the in-class pronunciation exercises.
Writing is a necessary skill in a context where most jobs in computing
are in international companies whose written communication is in English.
The students practised writing through in-class exercises focusing on the
mistakes they most commonly made in their academic papers. Outside of
class, the students worked in groups, and each group read and summarised
Figure 3. Sample Vocabulary Exercise

Group 1 Academic Words (Most frequent words on the list)

approach  assess  available  constitute  derive  environment  finance   income
involve  issue  labour  policy  principle  proceed  significant  source
Complete the following sentences with a word from the ones above (some words have to
be used more than once). You may need to change the verb in order to ensure that it is
grammatically correct.
a) Seven days__________ a week.
b) A bicycle and a motorbike are built on the same _______, though the force that
moves them is different.
c) A reporter cannot give away his/her _________.
d) Don’t _____ other people in your mistakes.
e) Follow up the river to discover its _________.
f ) He ________ a lot of pleasure from creating new programs.

A Novice’s Experience at Designing a Course for Adults

g) He _________ my table and took a seat opposite me.
h) He is a man of ___________ and he will not tell a secret.
i) His _________ is quite low; he doesn’t get much money for his work and he is
always short of money.
j) His book presents a new _________ to the theory.
51
k) Now that our plans are settled, let us _________.
l) One of the ________ of this dictionary is that explanations should be in simple
language.
m) Sorry! That brand is not _________ anymore. They’re producing a new one.
n) That word _________ from Latin.
o) The ______ market has decreased lately, and the new workers are paid lower
wages.
p) The _________ of the company is to inform workers of any new improvements.
q) The new research has been _________ with public money.
r) The real ________ of this meeting is the appointment of the new director.
s) There has been a _________ improvement in old people’s conditions of life.
t) They haven’t _________ them properly; in fact they made them spend a lot of
unnecessary money.
u) Today’s _________ of The Times gives a complete report on the news about the
war.
v) We have to look after our ___________ or we run the risk of becoming a desert.
w) Who _________ this organisation?
continued on p. 52
 Figure 3 (cont.). Sample Vocabulary Exercise

Group 2 Academic Words (Second-most-frequent words in the list)

Associate the first thing that comes into your mind with these words when your partner
says them. Write the new word under the original.
1 2 3 4 5 6
achieve acquire appropriate assist chapter commission

compute conduct consequent credit design distinct

equate feature focus injure institute invest

item journal perceive purchase range relevant

reside resource seek site survey transfer

Developing a New Course for Adult Learners

three specialised journal articles and handed in the summaries at different

dates. I corrected the summaries’ grammar, structure, and organisation of
ideas, and the students revised them and handed them in again for evalua-
52 tion. I awarded the grade to the revised version.
I also adapted and created material for a Web page, especially writing
exercises and material on grammar and vocabulary. The aim was to give
beginning and postbeginning level students extra material to help them
improve their English. These students reported feeling lost, and I felt that
they were not progressing enough. Unfortunately, I could not finish all the
exercises for the Web page, but I did introduce some of them.

Student Assessment
The last decision I had to make was how to assess students’ performance in
the course. I decided to administer a test that would account for 70 percent
of the final grade. The test was an intermediate level, Web-based exam
divided into six parts, each covering a topic we had worked on during the
course: reading, grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, writing, and listening.
Before the exam, the students took and corrected a practice test in class so
they could assess themselves. For further practice, I introduced a second test
on the course Web page. The final grade was made up of the grade for the
final test, attendance and work in class (10 percent), homework (10 per-
cent), and the three written assignments (10 percent). This distribution
particularly helped people with a low level of English proficiency who had
made a great effort during the course.
 Figure 4. Sample Pronunciation Exercise

Place the words in the appropriate box.

sugar  moon  early  a  shows  country  fast  watch  call  meal  fish  seven
jazz  doesn’t  three  new  women  park  look  head  box  girl  Ann
Paul  burglar  go

// // /ɑ:/ /e/ /:/

// /i:/ /ɒ/ /ɔ:/ /υ/

/u:/ /ə/ /əυ/

A Novice’s Experience at Designing a Course for Adults

Write the words to which these phonetic transcriptions correspond.
/ʃɑυts/ /smθ/ /lɑ:s/
/’dɔ:tə/ /ði:z/ /’ðə/ 53
/kən’fju:n/ /z/ /’u:zŋ/
/wɒʃŋ/ /’ɒrn/ /:/

Which vowels would become /ə/, and what will not be pronounced in the following
sentences?
a. The computer was not working properly and the technician had to come a long
way to try to fix it.
b. Where is the meeting? I think they said it was on the second floor in front of the
photocopying room.

The results of the exam were very satisfactory. It was taken by sixty-three
students (thirteen more than the ones who attended class regularly): 14 per-
cent of the students failed, 44 percent received a C (equivalent to 50 percent
to 68 percent of correct answers), 32 percent a B (68 percent to 85 percent),
and 10 percent an A (from 86 percent to 100 percent). Thus, 86 percent of
the students passed the exam. Considering that the test was at an intermedi-
ate level and nearly 48 percent of the class had scored at the postbeginning
level or lower on the proficiency test administered on the first day of class,
the course had been effective.
 Course Evaluation and Analysis
The course was evaluated as an ongoing process based on my observations
of how the activities worked in class, the students’ peer assessment, and a
questionnaire about the course itself (see figure 5). The process ended in
February after the exam, when all the data from the students’ tests and ques-
tionnaires were collected. My observation of how well the activities worked
in class produced the first change in the design: I had noticed that the activi-
ties were more linguistically demanding than the students could cope with,
so I introduced new activities and modified others to more accurately suit
students’ needs and level the linguistic demands. For peer assessment, after
the students had completed an activity in some classes, I provided param-
eters for the activities and asked them to use the parameters to evaluate
their peers’ performance. For example, the students had to grade their peers’
performance in speaking activities—from 1 to 10—on grammar correctness,
usage of grammar points, appropriate use of vocabulary, overall comprehen-
sibility, and pronunciation. From the peer grading, students could see their
Developing a New Course for Adult Learners

progress and identify problem areas. I also graded the students’ performance
on the same activities using the same parameters.
In some sessions, I administered short vocabulary tests that we corrected
in class, and I recorded the grades. These tests encouraged students to study
54
vocabulary—which is one of their greatest problem areas and the most
demanded by students—while providing me with very good insights as to
how much every student was progressing in vocabulary. All these forms of
evaluation gave me information about which specific areas needed further
work and which activities had been more or less effective in class.
The last instrument used to evaluate the course was the questionnaire
(see figure 5). The course evaluation questionnaire consisted of four yes-or-
no questions, four questions asking students to rate different aspects of the
course, and two open-ended questions to develop some insights about the
course and to identify areas for improvement for the following year’s course.
The four yes-or-no questions asked students to state whether they were satis-
fied with the content (i.e., it fulfilled the needs of students in their degree
program); whether the course had lived up to their expectations; whether
computers should be used for individual learning; and whether the group,
which consisted of students from two programs placed together for English,
should be separated by level or by degree program. The four rating questions
asked students to rate usefulness and levels of difficulty and easiness of the
various areas emphasised in the course, time invested versus results, and
overall learning. The two open-ended questions asked students to state what
aspects of the course they would change and what aspects they would leave
unchanged. Fifty students—the ones coming regularly to class—completed
the evaluation questionnaire, thirty before and twenty after the exam.
Figure 5. Evaluation Questionnaire

  1. Has the course lived up to your expectations? YES/NO

If not, why?
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
  2. Rate the different skills and aspects of the course from most useful (1) to least
useful (7):
Grammar Pronunciation
Reading Listening
Writing Speaking
Vocabulary
  3. Rate the skills and aspects of the course from most difficult (1) to least difficult
(7):

A Novice’s Experience at Designing a Course for Adults

Grammar Pronunciation
Reading Listening
Writing Speaking
Vocabulary
  4. Rate your learning in this subject: 55
None (0)  Little (1)  Good (2)  Very good (3)  Excellent (5)
  5. Rate the relation between the time invested in the subject and how much
learning you have achieved:
None (0)  Little (1)  Good (2)  Very good (3)  Excellent (5)
  6. Do you think the course fulfills the needs of the students of your degree?
YES/NO
  7. What would you leave as it is in the course?
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
  8. What would you change?
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
  9. Do you think some aspects should be worked individually on the computers?
YES/NO
10. Do you think there should be two groups in this subject? YES/ NO
If yes, the separation should be (a) by degree program, (b) by level, (c) both.
 The answers to the yes-or-no questions showed that 68 percent of the
students believed that the course had lived up to their expectations but that
32 percent believed that it had not because they had expected only specific
language and readings. Though 78 percent of the students explained that the
course fulfilled the needs of the students in their degree program, 22 percent
of the students expressed the contrary. Concerning computers, 76 percent
stated that they should be used for individual learning in the classes, and
24 percent claimed that nothing could be gained from their use. Most
students believed that students enroled in the two different programs should
have separate courses (82 percent), and, from those, 65 percent favoured
separation by level, 23 percent by degree program, and 23 percent thought
separation by both level and degree program were necessary. As previously
mentioned, students enroled in two different programs (telecommunications
sound and image and computer management) had been placed together in
the same English class, though in the rest of the subjects they were separated
by specialty. This structure meant that in the other subjects, classes had
fewer students (in the questionnaire only 18 percent of the students consid-
Developing a New Course for Adult Learners

ered acceptable the number of people in the course), and thus the syllabus
could be more suited to the needs of the students in one program instead of
trying to suit the needs of both.
Table 2 contains the students’ rankings of the different aspects of the
56
course. The results show the order in which the students ranked the areas
and the percentage of students that ranked each area in first, second, or
third place. These results are rather surprising if we compare the data across
the three parameters. First, although half of the class considered reading as
the most useful skill, reading ranked last in difficulty (i.e., least difficult)
and second in easiness, which suggests that it may not be as necessary as the
students thought it was. Vocabulary was not considered very difficult, either,
although it ranked as the second most useful skill. I think students often ask
to study vocabulary because they underestimate their knowledge of it, when,
in fact, they are quite familiar with specific vocabulary because they have
been assigned to read authentic texts in other subjects. The results of the stu-
dents’ evaluation also suggest that listening is an important skill to develop
because students ranked it as the third most useful and consistently as one of
the most difficult and the least easy: only 10 percent of the students in the
class considered it the easiest skill to learn. The same could be said of writ-
ing. Pronunciation should be further analysed because students deemed it as
the least useful skill but also the most difficult and the least easy. As I have
previously mentioned, students do very little work on pronunciation in high
school, and they are not aware of its importance. To overcome this tendency
among students, I should have stressed the importance of knowing how to
 Table 2. Ranking of Usefulness, Difficulty, and Easiness
Most useful Percentage Most difficult Percentage Easiest skill Percentage
skill or area of students skill or area of students or area of students
Reading 50 Pronunciation 56 Grammar 38
Vocabulary 44 Everything 24 Nothing 32
Listening 34 Listening 24 Reading 18
Grammar 26 Writing 24 Listening 10
Writing 22 Grammar 16 Vocabulary 10
Pronunciation 12 Vocabulary 12 Writing  2
Everything  4 Reading  8 Pronunciation  2
Note: Total number of students 5 50.

pronounce unknown words and the usefulness of this knowledge for their

A Novice’s Experience at Designing a Course for Adults

future professional life.
The ranking may allow us to reconsider the importance of reading and
grammar, which are usually the main foci of specific language courses. Read-
ing ranked last in difficulty and third in easiness, and grammar ranked fifth
in difficulty, first in easiness. These results might seem contradictory, but
57
they illustrate the fact that considering a skill not difficult is not equivalent
to considering that skill easy. Nevertheless, the results show that the students
consider grammar and reading among the easiest skills. This result might
suggest that specific language courses should pay the least attention to those
skills because the students are familiar with the reading and basic grammar
necessary to deal with the language they need but that such courses should
devote quite a lot more work to listening, writing, and pronunciation.
However, I think we should be cautious with this analysis. The results are
not very consistent, especially regarding difficulty and easiness, which may
mean that students did not reflect sufficiently on these questions. Had the
questionnaire been administered to a larger number of students or had other
instruments been used to evaluate the course, the results may have been
quite different.
Teachers should always consider the relation between overall learning
versus effort invested in the subject when evaluating a course because it will
enable them to better understand why learning is (or is not) taking place.
Many times, students state that no learning has taken place because they
have devoted little time and effort to the subject. If they are not specifically
asked to state this relation, this important factor may be underestimated.
When asked to rate the relationship between the time they had invested in
 the subject and the results obtained (in terms of the grade they expected and
the learning achieved), the students answered as follows: no relation, 10 per-
cent; little, 6 percent; good, 20 percent; very good, 20 percent; and excellent,
36 percent. Four students (8 percent) did not answer the question and
stated that they would know the relation after the exam. Considering their
overall learning, students answered as follows: learned nothing, 4 percent;
learned little, 22 percent; good, 30 percent; very good, 14 percent; and excel-
lent, 30 percent.
For the open-ended questions, which asked students what they would
leave and what they would change to improve the course, the answers were
varied. Some of the students (16 percent) explained that they would leave
all the activities as they were; 24 percent would leave the journal article
summary writing activity unchanged; 24 percent would leave the vocabulary
work; and 48 percent would leave the listening work. Students had more
suggestions about what to modify: 44 percent stated that the class should
have fewer students; 38 percent said that English should be included in
every year of the degree program and more time should be dedicated to it;
Developing a New Course for Adult Learners

34 percent would like to have more in-depth grammar instruction, which

means more time devoted to grammar explanations and exercises; 28 per-
cent reported the need for more specificity in vocabulary and language more
concentrated in their specialty; 24 percent mentioned that less time should
58
be dedicated to pronunciation and some said none at all; 16 percent wanted
more time dedicated to speaking; and 8 percent wanted more readings. One
student mentioned the need to do presentations, another the need to lower
the level of the course, and another the need for individual and not group
summaries (Bueno Alastuey 2004). The results of the questionnaire suggest
that students worked harder than they had expected to before the course
started.
In summary, the course lived up to the students’ expectations. Most of
students learned enough specific English to enable them to get by in written
and spoken English. Most reported having found the course entertaining
and relevant. The results of the questionnaire show that the course was use-
ful, although most students (especially the ones at very low or high profi-
ciency levels) would have preferred that it concentrate more on technical
vocabulary and material. The majority reported that the pronunciation work
was not relevant or useful but very difficult and suggested that for students
to progress, the class size had to be smaller.

Reflections and the Future

Designing a course is much harder than I had imagined. The course design
process is very time consuming—without creating much material. Also,
being a novice, both at teaching at the undergraduate level and at design-
ing courses, I feel that I have invested much time in changing things that I
would probably not have done had I been more experienced. Nevertheless,
this has been a great experience. I have discovered that the books I have used
in other courses are the result of very hard work, many decisions, and a great
deal of time devoted to creating proper activities.
Here are the problems I noticed and the improvements that I have
planned:
  1. The content of the book was appropriate for the students enroled
in only one of the degree programs and too difficult for the major-
ity of the students in both degree programs. In the future, I will
select a lower-level book and easier material for the course. Some
of the material also has to be more focused on telecommunications
topics for image and sound students; all of them complained in
the questionnaires that although some of the course topics were
relevant for them, the great majority were more relevant for the

A Novice’s Experience at Designing a Course for Adults

computer management students.
  2. The results of the level test did not reflect the students’ real profi-
ciency levels as seen in class and in homework.3 In the future, I will
introduce a longer level test on the course Web page, and students
will be asked to complete it and send it when they enrol for the
course. In this way, results will be available earlier. 59
  3. The needs analysis questionnaire will be revised and some questions
about on-the-job situations included so that some tasks reflecting
the students’ professional situations and needs are included in the
course. The students may have a clearer idea of the situations they
expect to encounter in their professional life than language teach-
ers, who are guessing at this stage.
  4. I will use Spanish rather than English in the needs analysis ques-
tionnaire because some students seemed to have had difficulty
expressing their real needs in English. I will also include some
open-ended questions to allow students to express what they want
(Hutchinson and Waters 1987), something that was difficult when
answering the needs analysis questions.
  5. I will hold at least one weekly session in computer classrooms, and
I will use the Web to provide more individualised instruction and
to allow students to work on their needs. The university’s Web site

3
 It was mentioned after the class ended that some students answered some of the questions
incorrectly on purpose so that the level of the class would be lowered, which they believed
would allow them to get a better grade. I do not know how many students did that or, in
fact, if any of them did. However, I believe that a longer level test corrected automatically
on the Web could solve that problem.
 includes grammar, writing, and listening exercises so students at
different proficiency levels and with varying interests can select
exercises that are relevant to their individual needs.
  6. On some occasions, I had planned too much material for one
session and had to leave some of it out (e.g., speaking activities)
because I ran out of time. To avoid having to leave out too many
activities, I will make devoting the right amount of time to each
activity a priority.
  7. I will stress the importance of pronunciation so that students
value the work in that area. Because the purpose of the course is
to prepare students for their professional life after graduation, I
must also emphasise the importance of phonetic transcriptions as a
means of correctly pronouncing unknown words. Students should
also realise they need not hear everything pronounced clearly in a
message to understand it. Probably, more individualised work is
needed in this area. Computers can facilitate this work while the
rest of the students are working on something else.
Developing a New Course for Adult Learners

  8. Two different courses will be offered: one for low proficiency level
students (from both courses) and one for higher proficiency level
students. Offering two different courses will allow for more speak-
ing activities (the second skill area most demanded in the needs
60
analysis), more interaction between teacher and students, and more
integrated activities for the higher level group focusing on technical
texts.
  9. The students will not be assigned to sit together in mixed-level
groups because this creates problems when students are absent. I
noticed that some high proficiency level students tended to miss
classes on reading or grammar, leaving the weaker students, who
needed more support, to be reassigned to work with other people.
Students will be allowed to choose where they sit.
I also noticed several areas of success:
  1. Students reported that the listening activities, especially the fill-in-
the-gaps and note-taking activities, were very useful, and they con-
sidered the different levels of listening activities very appropriate.
  2. Students considered the reading exercises that I created based on
readings from the book to be more useful than the exercises in the
book.
  3. The grammar revision activities reminded the students of their
grammar studies in high school and helped them improve their
understanding of grammar rules and usage.
   4. Students noted that the activity requiring them to summarise
journal articles and revise their summaries was one of the most
useful class activities.
  5. They considered the vocabulary work entertaining and relevant.

Conclusion
As I have mentioned, I designed and selected most of the activities as the
course was taking place. This continuous process allowed for a more accu-
rate selection of materials because I knew exactly where we were at each
stage of the course. This was one of the unplanned steps that ended up being
part of the course design process. Another unplanned step was the random
collection of homework. When I noticed the students were not doing it, I
started collecting and evaluating homework from ten or twelve students at
random each day.
The design and implementation of this course has been one of the most

A Novice’s Experience at Designing a Course for Adults

challenging tasks of my life, and I never dreamed it would take so much
time and hard work. However, it has allowed me to create a great deal of
material that I will improve and use in the future, and I have developed
a deeper understanding of the process not only of designing a course but
also of how the people who use the material react to it and how unexpected
61
those reactions are sometimes. I have also learned that students often find
material dealing exclusively with topics of their specialty boring, but they
nevertheless demand more work on it, and that to build a successful course,
this type of material has to be integrated with more general speaking activi-
ties. In fact, in the majority of professional contexts, much of the talk
involves interaction for social purposes so specific language classes also have
to reflect this aspect.
I hope that other people new in this field will find this account useful
and will try some of the things that worked for me. I also hope that this
account will encourage other novices to give their accounts of designing
courses so that others can learn from those first steps. Certainly if I had had
other novices’ accounts, I could have avoided many of the early mistakes I
made in designing this course.