Curriculum approaches in language teaching

Curriculum Approaches in Language Teaching: Forward, Central, and Backward Design Curriculum Approaches in Language Teaching: Forward, Central, and Backward Design
The research paper by Richards (2013) mainly revolves around the development of an appropriate curriculum for the teaching languages and its implementation to the same. The three different approaches related to the curriculum namely the Forward Design, the Central Design and the Backward Design have been discussed in the paper in details. Correspondingly, a descriptive comparison has been made in order to evaluate the best out of them to be able to apply in the curriculum in the near future (Richards, 2013).
The research was conducted based on the data collected from the secondary sources and no primary data was used for the same. Therefore, the past trends were the only process for addressing the curriculum requirements, which cannot be conferred as completely reliable source of data. The data about the teaching patterns were not collected from the teachers of the students on a recent note; therefore, the data could be outdated. These might make the collection and the analysis of the data non-reliable largely (Richards, 2013).
Although the research paper has provided a vast overview of the theoretical aspects along with the clear illustrations for the effective understanding from a nonprofessional’s perspective, but the absence of the experience of the real respondents makes the research void and ineffective. Based on the results obtained about the approaches in the paper, it was determined that all the three curriculum approaches had their own identity and importance in their field of needs. At the end, the comparative study of the three approaches was tabulated for the best understanding of the readers and the future researchers. Therefore, it can be concluded that although the research was successful in developing and implementing proper approaches in the teaching process, but it could not end up finding the best approach out of the three, which is an another limitation of the research paper (Richards, 2013).

Reference
Richards, J. C. (2013). Curriculum approaches in language teaching: Forward, central, and backward design. RELC Journal, 44(1), 5–33.