Having good oral communication skills, either in the target language or in the native tongue of the teacher, is one of the most important characteristics a language teacher should have. When it is established in a second language, i.e. in English in our case, oral communication might become much harder. One reason for this is the need for a certain level of proficiency in the second language, in addition to oral communication skills such as speaking in front of people, speaking fluently, and maintaining conversation and so on.

In language courses at primary and secondary schools in Turkey, speaking, listening and sometimes writing are the three areas that are ignored (with speaking being ignored the most); since there is no testing of these skills in national high stakes exams. The only skill emphasized in language learning is - and also what is tested is - reading, in addition to language areas such as grammar and vocabulary. Because of this negative backwash effect of the exam system, students come to universities with sufficient knowledge of grammar and vocabulary, but they lack speaking and listening skills. Especially in departments in English language field, this is highly observable since students’ language abilities directly come into play in their undergraduate education.

To educate future teachers of English, one basic necessity is to help them become good models for their future learners. In order to achieve this aim, Oral Communication Skills course plays an important role. The target course, which is Oral Communication course for freshman English Language Teaching (ELT) students, will be designed taking into account the environmental factors; students, teachers, and graduates opinions about needs, as well as general teaching approaches and principles derived from research and literature. In order to design Oral Communication Skills curriculum, Nation and Macalister’s (2010) model of curriculum design will be used. According to this model, designing a language course curriculum starts with environment and needs analyses steps complemented by principles, which together guides the determination of goals, content and sequencing, format and presentation, monitoring and assessment; and ends with overall evaluation of the designed curriculum (Nation and Macalister, 2010).

In this project, all the steps of the above mentioned curriculum design process are followed; and therefore, “output of one stage becomes the input of the next” (Nation and Macalister 2010, p.142). This approach to design is named by Macalister and Sou (2006) as the “waterfall model” (as cited in Nation and Macalister 2010). For this project, the time and resources available made waterfall approach possible; since there was no immediacy to start the course when the design process started (the course will be given next semester) and since participants (students who will take the course, instructors who will give the course) were available, starting from a deep analysis of needs and environment was possible. The results of needs and environment analyses shaped the principles and principles guided the other stages.

This curriculum design project is specially aimed to develop a specific course for a specific group of students, pre-service language teachers of English in Turkey considering the difficulties in speaking they have been experiencing due to the negative washback effect of the national testing policies in the country. However, this project is believed to be a good model for any language course as the underlying principles of the process could be valid and adapted for all the curriculum design projects. 

Nation, I.S.P and Macalister, J. (2010). Language Curriculum Design. New York: Routledge Nunan, D. and Lamb, C. (1996). The Self-Directed Teacher: Managing the Learning Process. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Stoller, F., & Grabe, W. (1997). Content-based instruction: Research foundations. In M. A. Snow and D. M. Brinton (Eds.), The content-based classroom: Perspectives on integrating language and content (pp. 78–94). White Plains, NY:Addison Wesley Longman.