Procedural Syllabus

3.4.4.2.2 The procedural syllabus

The Procedural syllabus is associated with Prabhu, Ramani and others (then) at the Regional Institute of English in Bangalore, India. Prabhu was dissatisfied with the Structural-Oral-Situational method which had been developed and was generally in use in the 1960s, so he evolved an approach based on the principle that the learning of form is best carried out when attention is given to meaning (cf. Palmer, 1917/1968). The Bangalore Madras Communicational Teaching Project (CTP) (Prabhu 1980; 1984; 1987) was implemented in eight classrooms with 18 teachers and 390 children aged 8 to 15, for periods of one to three years, from 1979 to 1984. Early influences were similar to those of the Malaysian communicative syllabi (Rodgers 1979; 1984), but were quickly abandoned. The Project was not set up as an experiment, so evaluation was not part of the original plan, and Beretta and Davies, when carrying out an evaluation in 1984 (Beretta & Davies 1985), had to use intact classes, rather than operate in a "stripped down environment" (Beretta 1986a) with limitations on the validity of their findings. They saw the results of the evaluation as on the whole positive, though pointing out the difficulty of designing satisfactory Which? type comparative research procedures to evaluate methodologies (cf. Cronbach 1963). However, Greenwood (1985) suggests that none of the accounts of the project offered sufficient evidence to evaluate the claims made for the procedural syllabus and its associated methodology (White 1988:108).

At the basis of the CTP are tasks which engage the learner in thinking processes, the focus of which is completion of the task rather than learning the language, agreeing with Krashen (1982) that language form is acquired subconsciously when the learner's attention is focused on meaning (cf. table 30, below):

Task-based teaching operates 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 (or recreates, as a cognitive structure) some of the linguistic structuring embodied in those entities, as a step in the development of an internal system of rules. The intensive exposure caused by an effort to work out meaning-content is thus a condition which is favourable to the subconscious abstraction - or cognitive formation - of language structure. (Prabhu 1987:69-70). Teaching through communication, rather than for communication (Prabhu 1980:164) was an important aspect of this programme, though it is interesting to note that the core goal was grammatical, rather than communicative competence, interaction in the target language, or activation and development of learning skills:

The radical departure from CLT in the Bangalore Project lay not in the tasks themselves, but in the accompanying pedagogic focus on task completion instead of the language

...