•  It consists of designing a guide that involves a group of structured, well-organized and intelligible activities, developed to accomplish the objectives which have a special purpose known by both the teacher and the learners.

•  General Information

•  Target Content/Cognitive Target

•  Objectives

•  Functions

•  Language Examples

•  Procedures or Mediation Activities

•  Values/Attitudes and Culture

•  Evaluation of the Learning Outcomes

•  It constitutes the heading of the page.

•  It constitutes the name of the institution, the corrresponding level, the teacher’s name and the period of time the unit is going to last.

•  It is “the what” the students are going to do in the class, which means content, the topic(s) included in the plan that the teacher is going to develop.

•  In I and II Cycles, it includes the topics or themes to be covered in the four study blocks.

•  They are the learning outcomes that students should achieve.

•  They must give response to the current educational aims and policies.

•  They may refer to activities, skills, language type or a combination of all these.

•  The syllabus has a list of objectives for each level because there are different stages in the class to achieve skills.

•  Objectives from our syllabus are skill-based, not content-based. For that reason, they are neither general nor specific.

•  They are established basically in terms of the four basic linguistic skills.

•  Objectives are classified to develop receptive or productive skills.

•  When planning for the I Cycle the teacher should choose at least two objectives for listening and two for speaking and one for culture and values.

•  For the II Cycle the teacher should choose at least one objective for each skill and one for culture and values. It is not necessary to modify the objectives because they are established in terms of operational elements.

•  They are sample structures and vocabulary that serve as the vehicle to achieve the skill-based objectives.

•  The task of the teacher is to choose the language to present to the students.

•  Structure of the language, linguistic pattern and the vocabulary.

•  The Syllabus provides some sample language. The teacher can add other linguistic patterns according to students’ interests and needs.

•  They are the skills that learners develop by means of the learning situations that are given to them to find solutions or to make decisions.

•  They should be a purpose for using the language.

•  Steps to carry out and achieve objectives.

•  It is a set of stages or steps organized in sequence. (Rivers 1978)

•  They deal with the actions that need to be taken in the classroom in order to help students achieve objectives.

•  It is necessary to take into account the learners and the demands of the program.

•  The lessons structure is divided into five steps.

•  These are the stages or steps organized in sequence.

•  It is usually a brief lively session to welcome the students to their second language class, to their new topic or reinforce a previous one.

•  It is varied and motivating way before starting the lesson. It should include games, songs, riddles, jokes, etc.

• Students should be encouraged to participate and have fun.

•  Introduction of new language components, structures and vocabulary. •  It is carried out by the teacher with a lot of input for students. •  Getting the meaning across is essential. •  Students are allowed time to assimilate the language, to listen actively and to try to understand what the teacher is saying. •  The teacher uses simple, but natural language through different techniques.

•  It is divided into controlled practice and creative practice. (For the purpose of the I and II Cycle Syllabus, both “controlled practice” and “creative practice”, stated by Rivers’ module are integrated into one single step called “practice”)

•  Students use the new linguistic components in a relatively limited settting by playing with the structures of the languages.

•  The teacher should prepare exercises that go from purely mechanical, repetitive drills, to transformation exercises demanding a lot thought on the part of the learners.

•  In this step, students are rewarded for their efforts.

•  It is a “skill using” stage in which students should be able to take risks, to try to incorporate their language adquisitions to their background knowledge to produce new situations, appropriate to their needs and interests.

•  The activities planned should take the form of “tasks” which allow group work and problem solving. There must be tolerance from the teacher to the students’ mistakes.

•  The role of the teacher is to manage and facilitate the different learning activities.

•  In this final step, the teacher points out what has been accomplished successfully and what remains to be improved through certain review exercises, which were introduced and practiced before.

•  This is also the moment to comment on the students’ performance.

•  Also the students are encouraged to find original situations where their new linguistic acquisitions can be applied, for example dramatizations, original role plays, simulations, etc.

•  However, if the previous step was very demanding, the teacher can simply concentrate on the correcting and encouraging of students’ output.

•  Promote positive attitudes and values during the teaching and learning process.

•  It is the correspondence between what is said with what is done among teachers, students and the educational community in general.

•  Teachers should provide the students with the opportunities to compare culture with that of countries where English is spoken and to reinforce Costa Rican values.

•  Attitudes during the teaching- learning process.

•  Cultural comparison of others and ours.

•  The teacher chooses different tasks, which match both the objectives and the procedures from the plan that will be considered suitable for evaluating the students’ language skills.

•  It is the adjustment of the teaching and learning process in order to meet the individual characteristics, differences and needs of those students with special educational needs.

•  There are three basic types of curricular accommodations: access (modifications of the physical space), non-significant (those that do not modify substantially the curriculum), and significant (require the elimination or addition of cognitive targets and/or objectives, depending on each student special needs).

•  Specify the non-significant accommodations for those students with special needs.

•  A different plan is requested for those students with significant accommodations.

Linguistic Objectives

Functions

and

Language

Procedures

Values

and Attitudes

Evaluation of Learning

Outcomes

Choose at least one criterion for each step

Only I Cycle

I

and

II Cycles

Linguistic Objectives

Language

Examples Procedures

Values

and Attitudes

Evaluation of Learning

Outcomes

Choose at least one criterion for each step