ELT Teacher Trainees’ Encounters with Syllabus Design

In ELT (English Language Teaching) departments, prospective teachers come across a wide range of methodological domains which are applied and theoretical. Most of the instructional patterns can be practiced in microteachings. Upon feedback, the mistakes can be corrected and the procedures reworked if required. Nevertheless, syllabus, which is the basic system of instruction, is mostly out of reach in terms of ‘design’ in teacher training programs. Trainees may have access to discussions about the syllabuses of the course-books they analyze only if there is a course focusing on course-book analysis and adaptation in the teacher training program. Naturally, the applied concern with syllabus design is mostly at introductory level. In many geographies, syllabuses come ready and the publishers and instructors implement it with some flexibility. In classroom application, mostly, the contents sections of the course-books contain the language materials (grammar patterns and vocabulary) to be studied and they basically represent the syllabi to be followed by the instructors. There is generally on-line access to the curricula for further assistance. When teacher training is concerned, the pre-service familiarity with syllabus types and design plays an important part prospectively for the future implementation and assessment of the teaching programs. The trainees, in this respect, have to develop an insight into syllabus design and adaptation as well as types for further encounters. This argument attempts to touch on teacher trainees possible encounters with the syllabus. The encounters of the prospective teachers with syllabus design may be of very introductory nature such as discovering and examining the basics of syllabus design, types of syllabus, grammar and syllabus relationship, and syllabus adaptation. Naturally, the microteachings that trainees present contain language patterns from a syllabus. In this vein, their familiarity with syllabus issues is fundamental