bankruptcy
Bankruptcy | Jonathan Clifton | December 9th, 2000
Simon Cole wrote:
c. bankruptcy- frankly I'm confused about what this is from Jane's description (CSD U1 p 12). Anyone care to explain it for me?
I suppose bankruptcy is when a method/approach no longer has validity in the eyes of some or all of the stakeholders (learners, teachers, linguists, etc). So, I suppose we could say that the audio-lingual approach is now bankrupt (or could we????).
Best wishes,
Jonathan
Re: Bankruptcy | Pinkie | December 11th, 2000
Greetings fellows MSc-ers...
Moving on to the Simon's thread about CSD, I'd like to comment on bankruptcy... I'm not sure that Jonathan's suggested definition accords with what I understand this term to mean. [Truth be told, what little understanding I have is based on a recent single-afternoon CSD workshop in Madrid, very interesting but very short: so what follows to be taken with large pinches of NaCl]. I understood a low-bankruptcy syllabus to be one that will be relevant to a student over a large proportion of her "lifetime learning process"; a high-bankruptcy syllabus will cover only a relatively small stretch of that process. If my understanding is more or less correct, I wonder whether the word "bankruptcy" is rather unhelpful: perhaps "length of coverage" (as opposed to "breadth of coverage") might be more transparent?
Anyhow, I haven't seen the definition of this term, on p 12 of the CSD module according to Simon. Would anyone have time to post it to the list?
I'd certainly agree that the idea of "durability"/"shelf-life" mentioned by Jonathan is relevant. Though I guess it's rather hard to judge whether your syllabus is going to lose validity in the future: much easier to predict this in the case of materials per se, e.g. a unit written now about Britney Spears will presumably be rather stale in a couple of years' time!
Best,
Pinkie
Spain
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