Taking a look at several kinds of syllabus design, I found that each design

explained in this material fundamentally differs from others in terms of what to

be considered as its criterion. As for the components of syllabus designing
process, Robinson explained at the very beginning that it consists of setting
units which are eventually organized in sequence to construct the entire
syllabus (or in the opposite order or without setting any prospective plan). Each
syllabus design has its unique criterion, and thus its own units and learning
process based on it.
I personally learned a lot from each syllabus design since I have never thought
of what syllabuses are actually based on. As my experience as an ESL learner,
all I noticed about the syllabus was that teachers taught us based on what were
on the textbook, in the order grammatical items are presented in it. As an ESL
teacher, I just made teaching plan basically along the textbook as I told by my
instructor. Actually, I felt it really important to actually think about and plan
what to teach and in what order, depending on the group of students we teach.
The effective teaching should always be learner-centered and creative.
In terms of the role of learners in syllabus design, the biggest interest of mine
in the reading was how to set units and organize them. Some of the designs are
made, grammatically or structurally grading items to be learned based on the
analysis of difficulty, collocation, function, frequency and so on, or on the
categories of items. We might say that there are some sort of such universal
learning process for ESL learners and that we can categorize and grade
language components for them to learn, but it actually depends on individual
learners, each of whom has different linguistic, cultural, and social backgrounds.
One of the examples for this might be how some European students and Asian
students perceive a certain grammar in different ways. If the mother tongue of
the European students are from the same language family as English, their
language and English may share many grammatical concepts that is completely
alien to the Asian students whose first language is from the different language
family. In such a case, the certain grammatical item might be different in how it
is perceived from each group of students. For one group, it might be easy and
thus should be learned at the very beginning, but for the other, it may not.
Thus, every teacher should know that what they know about syllabus design
might not work for their students.
However hard we learn theories of syllabus design, they are not more than just
fundamental knowledge based on which we actually create syllabus for our
students. Teaching activities are thus always need to be learner-centered and
creative. Looking at different kinds of syllabus design gave me many insights to
know what we can consider in planning our teaching. Also, I found that there
were no perfect design since it should be actually adjusted whom we teach. The
important role of teachers might be getting to know various syllabus design and
understand their underlying theory and make use of them designing their own
syllabus. Also, to do this, they need to observe students well in order to know
their background, needs and internal language competency to think how the
language would be taught internalized.