Diary: Presentations: Laptops, new softwares, green movement and other stuff

I have acquired something unbelievably valuable. You can perform something relatively well on stage without having the mastery you should essentially have. I owe this great achievement to my own efforts towards finding a new presentation software within the last few month resulting in finding Articulate software. Unfortunately I just could find the free trial version of the software which is a fully functioning version but limited to a 30-day use.
I was supposed to present three papers in the book Innovation in English Language Teaching. But what I did out of the classroom was working on only two of them and what I did in the classroom was presenting just one. This entry deals with the first paper which I presented in the last session of the class:

Designing the Discourse Syllabus by Michael McCarthy and Ronald Carter

In this paper, the authors start their discussion by pointing out that the adequate description of language is vital as a precursor of language teaching syllabuses. They continued their discussion by introducing the notion of discourse competence. In this section they try to provide a historical background on evolution of syllabus after the emergence of distinction between competence and performance made by Chomsky. The idea of competence later was expanded by Hymes who coined the term communicative competence. The notion of communicative competence has had a very powerful influence on language teaching resulting in emergence of communicative syllabus. The major effort of the authors in this section is to criticize the notion of a pure notional-functional syllabus which primarily puts emphasis on developing the ability to communicate without any real emphasis on grammatical and lexical correctness. In order for them to proceed with this issue they provide two examples of syllabi in which linguistic competence has been included: eclectic syllabus and proportional syllabus. Later on, the authors introduce another component "discourse competence" which consists of two subdivisions: Socio-linguistic competence and Strategic competence. At this stage two questions are posed: can we actually divide these subcomponents form the notion of discourse and are they really teachable?
As a result of such discrete look at components, the authors provide us with the views of some notable writers on syllabus design- as they mentioned like this- that the analysis of language into its various levels and the classification of features within those levels is a feasible basis for syllabus specifications. The main aim of the authors is to provide us with an integrative view towards the notion of discourse thus designing a syllabus primarily based on the notion of discourse not a syllabus in which discourse competence has been included as a component or layer. To do this they first introduced the ideas of Munby and Yalden both of who viewed discourse competence as an additional component or layer added to the syllabus. In order to present an integrative view, the authors present a model of syllabus design proposed by Aston. Aston recognizes the problems created by analysis and classification as the precursor of syllabus specifications. Aston believes that any analysis claiming to describe competence and to itemize it for a syllabus will fail to capture the fact that discourse is realized by the creative exploitation of the resources that constitute competence. In this way it seems that Aston favors a task-based approach and it is actually true but he is not that much interested in extreme views of the task-based approach which would be the completely negotiable syllabus. He seeks to build a syllabus in which teaching can operate as a guidance. Aston, therefore, favors a task-based approach that does not shy away from specifying the discourse strategies that the learner will need. These needs will be specified in a strategic pre-syllabus. The model proposed by the authors is also an integrative one. They employ a language-as-discourse perspective which affects every part of the syllabus. In their model they propose a set of strategy-headings that can act as a kind of filter between the learners' needs and the specification of tasks. The most general headings are:
1- Genre-related strategies
2- Coherence-related strategies
3- Politeness strategies
4- Planning strategies
5- Convergence strategies
6- Repair strategies
As a conclusion, authors hope that their paper can only make us better and more efficient syllabus designers, task designers, dialogue-writers, materials adaptors and evaluators of everything we do and handle in classroom. They also believe that the moment one starts to think of language as discourse, the entire landscape changes, usually forever.

Some notes:
I read this text several times until I have partly understood it. I believe the authors were not that much successful in activating and creating the background knowledge essential for understanding the text. In the section in which they were trying to provide background historical knowledge a sudden jump has been seen in transition to the notion of discourse competence. But it is worth mentioning that the concept the authors have brought to us is of primary importance.
I should also be careful that all these shortcomings- as I believe- may be the result of my being novice and inexperienced and this is the most probable reason.