Structural Syllabus

A syllabus organised around grammatical forms — verb tenses, sentence patterns, morphological contrasts — sequenced from simple to complex and from frequent to rare. The dominant model in mainstream ELT from the 1940s through the 1970s, and still the backbone of most general-English coursebooks.

Origin and Theoretical Basis

Structural syllabuses crystallised around the Audiolingual Method in the 1940s and 1950s, drawing on American structural linguistics (Bloomfield, Fries) and behaviourist psychology. Charles C. Fries, directing the English Language Institute at the University of Michigan, treated grammatical structure as the starting point for instruction; Robert Lado's Lado English Series (1977) and earlier contrastive-analysis work fed the same paradigm. British situational coursebooks of the 1950s — Hornby's Oxford Progressive English for Adult Learners (1954–56) and The Teaching of Structural Words and Sentence Patterns (1959–66) — paired structural sequencing with situational presentation.

Design Features

Items are isolated linguistic forms graded by perceived difficulty and productive yield. A typical sequence introduces present simple before present continuous, active before passive, and defining before non-defining relative clauses. Each unit presents one target structure, exemplifies it in a model dialogue or text, drills it through controlled practice, and tests it in production. The learner accumulates structures one by one and is expected to integrate them into communicative use later.

D.A. Wilkins (1976) labelled this kind of syllabus synthetic: the language is broken into parts, taught separately, and reassembled by the learner. The opposing logic, which presents whole communicative chunks for the learner to analyse, he called analytic.

Critiques

Wilkins's Notional Syllabuses (1976) argued that grammatical sequencing fails to deliver communicative competence because it organises around what learners should know rather than what they should be able to do. Later SLA research strengthened the case: morphological accuracy follows developmental orders that instruction cannot easily override, and isolated-structure mastery does not transfer reliably to spontaneous use. Michael Long and others linked the structural syllabus to the PPP cycle and to synthetic approaches more broadly, contrasting both with task-based alternatives.

Structural sequencing nonetheless persists in coursebooks and exam preparation, often embedded inside a Multi-Syllabus alongside functional, lexical, and skills strands.

Examples in Coursebooks

L. G. Alexander's First Things First and New Concept English (1967), Hornby's Oxford Progressive English, and Streamline English (Hartley and Viney, 1978) all used a structural spine, with situational presentation, controlled drills, and graded readers tracking the structural sequence. The same logic survives in modern grammar-led courses such as Grammar in Use (Murphy) and in the grammar strands of multi-syllabus coursebooks.

References

• Fries, C. C. (1945). Teaching and Learning English as a Foreign Language. University of Michigan Press.
• Hornby, A. S. (1954–56). Oxford Progressive English for Adult Learners. Oxford University Press.
• Wilkins, D. A. (1976). Notional Syllabuses. Oxford University Press.
• Richards, J. C., and Rodgers, T. S. (2014). Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching (3rd ed.). Cambridge University Press.