The Teacher's Guide for an EAP Course in Business Administration: Curriculum Design as a Problem Solving Activity

Abstract

This paper presents a case study in curriculum development: the preparation of a program for Chinese learners coming to Canada to study Business Administration. Constraints imposed by the project administration resulted in a teacher's guide for writing materials, rather than student materials. However, this solution is not presented as a compromise. On the contrary, the administration's requirements forced us to recognize the novel and dynamic nature of every curriculum development project which must integrate student needs within a program that is consistent with ESL specialists' ideas about language teaching. The teacher's guide for writing materials is a solution which extends the notion of the dynamic nature of curriculum development by making teachers an integral part of the curriculum development process. This has advantages for the students and for the teachers.