Diagnosis

[Iranian English Language Professors]

The first phase of the diagnostic stage of language pedagogy begins
with curricular plans and continues as an ongoing monitoring process
in the classroom. Language curricula call for an initial study of what
Richards (1990) calls “situational” needs, or the context of the
teaching. Situational needs include consideration of the country of
the institution, the socioeconomic and educational background of the
students, the specific purposes the students have in learning a
language, and institutional constraints that are imposed on a
curriculum. Some of the twelve principles cited earlier come into play
in isolating situational needs:
• Is language proficiency perceived by students as intrinsically
motivating?
• To what extent will the language in question involve students in
wrestling with a “new identity” and therefore imply a language ego
issue?
• What is the relationship between the target language and the native
culture of the students?
A host of other educational, sociological, and administrative
principles come to bear in specifying situational needs; these are but
a few.
The second phase of curricular development is typified by the
specification of linguistic — sometimes called “communicative” —
needs: the specific language forms and functions that should be
programmed into a course of study. Here again, certain principles of
learning and teaching inform our choices:
• To what extent are native-language and target-language contrasts
important to consider?
• How should interlanguage systematicity and variation affect
curriculum designs?
• What do studies of contrastive analysis, interlanguage, and
communicative
competence tell us about the sequencing of linguistic forms and
functions in a curriculum?
• How can the curriculum realize the principle of authenticity?
Of equal importance in the planning stages of language courses is the
specific diagnostic assessment of each student upon entering a
program. Once courses have been carefully planned, with pedagogical
options intricately woven in, how can teachers and/or administrators
become diagnostic scientists and artists, carefully eliciting language
production and comprehension on the part of every student? How should
those elicitations be measured and assessed in such a way that the
language course can be either slightly or greatly modified to meet the
needs of the particular students who happen to be in one’s class at
this moment?
None of these complex questions can be answered with the language
teaching profession’s recently interred methods! The crucial import of
the diagnostic phase of language courses precludes any consideration
of methods that are prepackaged for delivery to all learners. One of
the principal fields of inquiry in the profession today is this very
stage of diagnosis, that of more adequately pinpointing learners’
linguistic needs as they enter a program of study.