CURRICULUM AND SYLLABUS

DESIGN
COMPETENCY-BASED CURRICULUM
The History of curriculum in
Indonesian schools
We notice that curriculum are reviewed every about ten
years in Indonesia
= The 1975 curriculum – structural approach
= The 1984 curriculum – communicative approach
= The 1994 curriculum – meaningfulness approach
= The 2004 curriculum – competency based curriculum or
= KTSP- Curriculum based on the level of educational unit
The 2013 Curriculum – Scientific Approach
=> productive communicative activities -> speaking and
writing
=> receptive communicative activities -> reading and
listening

Communicative competence underlies the development

of the competency-based curriculum in Indonesia
There are three components of communicative
competence
= grammatical competence
= socio linguistic competence
= strategic competence (Swain, 1980)
Grammatical competence is the knowledge of the
rules of the language in terms of
Grammar
Morphology
Phonology
And the ability to use these rules in producing correct
utterances in a language
Appropriateness of utterances refers to both
appropriateness of meaning and appropriateness of the
form

Strategic competence is the mastery of communication

strategies used
To enhance the effectiveness of communication or
To compensate for breakdown in communication due to
the limiting factors in actual communication or to
insufficient competence
Canale ( 1983) identified four components of
communicative competence
= grammatical competence
= socio linguistic competence
= strategic competence
= discourse competence
Discourse competence is the ability to produce or
interpret coherent and cohesive utterances that accord
with the cultural and situational contexts that are
surround them
Language is social semiotic
(Halliday, 1978)
This theory also underlies the development of the
competency based curriculum
The theory says that when one is investigating
language use, several key concepts should be taken
into consideration
They are:
- the text
- the situation or the context
- the text variety or register
- The code
- The linguistic system and the
- The social structure

The context, the text, and the linguistic system strongly

influence the development of Indonesian competency-
based curriculum
The term ’text’ refers to any instances of linguistic
interaction in which people actually engage; whether is
said, or written, in an operational context as distinct
from a situational context like that of words listed in a
dictionary (Halliday, 1978, p 108)
Verbal communication
Verbal communication (written or spoken) is in fact a
text making activity
It is with the help of situational and cultural contexts
that one creates a text or interpret the meaning carried
out by a text. When one is speaking English, for
instance, he not only uses English words (vocabulary),
but also arrange them based on the syntactic rules of
English so that the produced text is comprehensible
Context is the second element of the socio-semiotic
theory of a language. It refers to anything that may
affect or is related to linguistic choice that one does
when one is creating or producing.

The context may be either cultural or situational.

The cultural context determines whether a text is
socially and culturally acceptable or not.
Situational context
The context of situation also colors the linguistic
choice of a speaker of a language. Three dimensions of
situational context are important:
1) the ongoing social activity (field)
2) the role relationships involved (tenor) and
3) rhetorical channel whether it is spoken or written
(mode)
These three factors determine whether a speaker is to
use formal or informal style.

The third major element is the linguistic system of a

language, which comprises three strata:
= semantic (meaning)
= lexico-grammatical (wording),
= and phonological (sound)
Of these there strata, semantic system is of primary
concern in a sociolinguistic investigation
Semantically, according to Halliday (1978, p 128), a
language serves one of the three functions: ideational,
interpersonal, and textual.
By ideational function it means that a language can be
used to construct and express an idea or information
Interpersonal function means that a language may
serve as a medium of interaction among speakers of
that language by which they can share their feelings,
attitudes, and so on.
Finally, the textual function is the function of a
language that govern the coherence and the cohesion
of a text so that it is easy for the readers or listeners to
catch the idea represented in it.
In other words, the learners’ ability to use the
language for ideational, interpersonal, and textual
purpose should be developed.
Reflection of the theories in the curriculum
Two theories strongly underlie the development of the
competency-based curriculum in Indonesia
1) communicative competence theory and
2) the theory of language as social semiotic
In what ways are the two theories reflected in the new
curriculum?
At the semantic level of the linguistic system in the
theory of language as social semiotic it is said that a
language serves three functions: ideational,
interpersonal, and textual.
This proposition is reflected in the statement of the
standard competence for the development of each of
the four macro-language skills is elaborated into
basic components s follows:
Listening
Students can understand ideational, interpersonal, and
textual meanings of interactional texts and other texts
such as explanation and discussions
Speaking
Students can express and understand ideational,
interpersonal, and textual meanings in a long enough
conversations for a number of communicative
purposes, particularly for explaining and discussing
things
Reading
Students can read aloud with correct pronunciation
and intonation, and understand ideational,
interpersonal, and textual meanings conveyed in
interactional, narrative, and descriptive texts that
contain many nouns phrases.
Writing
Students can write short paragraphs with correct
spelling and punctuation to express ideational,
interpersonal, and textual meanings in the forms of
recount, narration, description, and specific form such
as messages, letters, songs, and news that contain
noun phrases and nominalization
 Reading
The standard competence of the reading skill for the
third year students of junior secondary school as cited
above is elaborated into basic competence as follows:
Actional competence (rhetoric competence):
students can understand the meaning of sentences
that make up a text as indicated by correct pauses and
intonation (when reading aloud) and they understand
the stage of developing written texts, especially
personal letters, interview reports, explanations, and
discussions.
 Linguistic competence
Students can use correct accent and intonation when
reading aloud; understand the various sentence
patterns in written language with a focus on noun
phrase containing adjectives; understand every idea
found in the text and the function of sentences used to
express different types of meaning
 Sociocultural competence
Students can differentiate the styles of written and
spoken texts with the same genre; identify special
characteristic of simple scientific text in which
ideational function is more dominant than
interpersonal function
 Strategic competence
Students can develop several strategies in order to
comprehend every meaning found in a text of different
difficulty level
 Discourse competence

Students can
understand the structure of a number of written
texts, particularly letters, interview reports, news,
explanations, and discussions;
are aware of the differences in the structure of spoken
and written texts
Understand various communicative purposes and the
linguistic characteristics of texts for different
communicative purposes
Attitudinal competence
Students like reading activities, which are necessary
for their lives, develop reading habits, and make
reading as a tool to get knowledge.

At the implementation level, the two theories is

reflected in the fact that the use of competency-based
curriculum has demanded that teachers considers:
= correctness (grammaticality)
= appropriateness (acceptability) of utterances that
they produce
= since meaning is not context-free, contextual
learning is emphasized in the use of the curriculum