Critical Curriculum Development in Foreign Language Classroom

Article title : Critical Curriculum Development in Foreign Language Classroom
Writer         : -
Journal/Newspaper : -
Date published : -         Number of words: 319
List no. : 120

This article tells about the foreign language curriculum development- and in particular, to the concept of curriculum development. It also presents a serious challenge to understanding the development, implementation, and evaluation of democratic, and especially critical, approach to the curriculum. The authors asserted that foreign language curriculum cannot and should not be randomly and arbitrarily designed and implemented. Osborn (2000) used the concept of macro contextualization that critical curriculum development must proceed from the context of the world, the self in relation to the world, and the role of language and language education in the shaping of both independent of and dependent on the others. This theoretical starting point makes its way into practice in three ways: the critical language curriculum is built around the problem posing, it is holistically constructed, overarching disciplinary bounds as defined in the academic world; and it requires evaluation not as a measure of linguistic skill, but as an expression of language awareness. This process of macro contextualization led to the implication of foreign language pedagogy that is sensitive to the issues of diversity, and optimistic in their regard for social justice.
The authors put their selves not only as writers but also as observer. They cited others opinion and give a conclusion from those opinions and their own.
I would support the authors that foreign language curriculum cannot and should not be randomly and arbitrarily designed and implemented, because we have aims and objectives that we should reach toward curriculum. Furthermore, we need to see students’ need to design a curriculum.
In Indonesia, the development of foreign language curriculum (i.e. English) has changed about seven times using three different approaches. Along the same line, the Ministry of National Education has also developedand tried out the guideline of school-based management or SBM (Manajemen Peningkatan Mutu Berbasis Sekolah or MPMBS). Therefore, there will be the national curriculum and the school curriculum.