Negotiated Syllabus
A syllabus whose content, sequence, methods, and assessment are jointly decided by teacher and learners through explicit negotiation during the course. Learner agency is built into the curriculum rather than confined to within-task choices.
Origin
The model is the operational arm of the Process Syllabus proposed by Michael Breen and Christopher Candlin in Applied Linguistics (1980). Breen and Andrew Littlejohn worked it out in classroom detail in Classroom Decision-Making: Negotiation and Process Syllabuses in Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2000), drawing on case studies from primary, secondary, tertiary, and adult contexts across Europe, Latin America, and Asia.
Levels of Negotiation
Breen and Littlejohn (2000) identify three layers at which negotiation can operate:
- Personal negotiation: the silent decisions each learner makes about attention, effort, and interpretation.
- Interactive negotiation: moment-to-moment classroom adjustment of meaning and procedure.
- Procedural negotiation: explicit, public decision-making about what the class will study, how, and how it will be evaluated.
The negotiated syllabus targets the third layer. Procedural negotiation can be selective (limited to one aspect such as content, assessment, or pacing) or gradualist (expanding across more layers as learners develop the procedural literacy to handle them).
Design Features
A negotiated syllabus typically pairs an indicative content map — drawn from Needs Analysis, institutional requirements, and teacher experience — with a recurring decision cycle: propose, choose, act, evaluate, revise. Records of decisions and outcomes feed the next cycle. The teacher remains an expert participant rather than a delegate; non-negotiable elements (external exams, mandated content) are declared up front.
Relation to Process and Task-Based Syllabuses
The Process Syllabus is the broader framework; the negotiated syllabus is its operational realisation. Both contrast with product-oriented designs that fix content in advance. TBLT can be combined with negotiation when learners help select tasks, sequence them, or shape outcomes, though Long-style TBLT typically reserves task selection for needs-analytic specialists.
Critiques
Empirical studies (collected in Breen and Littlejohn 2000 and in later work by Nation, Macalister, and others) report gains in motivation and learner autonomy but also significant teacher workload, uneven uptake by learners habituated to teacher-led instruction, and tension with examination-driven systems. The model presupposes adult or near-adult learners; younger learners and beginner-level groups lack the metalinguistic vocabulary to negotiate procedurally without heavy scaffolding.
References
- Breen, M. P., and Candlin, C. N. (1980). The essentials of a communicative curriculum in language teaching. Applied Linguistics 1(2), 89–112.
- Breen, M. P., and Littlejohn, A. (eds.) (2000). Classroom Decision-Making: Negotiation and Process Syllabuses in Practice. Cambridge University Press.
- Nation, I. S. P., and Macalister, J. (2010). Language Curriculum Design. Routledge.