EFL Syllabus Design: Challenges of Implementation in Burkina Faso
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The widespread use of English in the social, political, economic, and international business spheres compels non-English speaking countries to revise their English language curricula to meet the needs of the global economy. In Burkina Faso, educational policy makers have revised the English as a foreign language (EFL) syllabi from middle to high school with the expectation of helping students achieve communicative competence. However, the delayed implementation of these new syllabi unveils a discomfort from the perspective of both teachers and teacher supervisors. This paper provides a critique of the syllabi of quatrième (4ème) – the US equivalent of 8th grades. It draws from document analysis and stakeholder interviews to highlight the discrepancies between the theory of the vision and the reality of the practice and assess the extent to which the syllabus promotes or hinders communicative competence. The overreaching argument is that despite tremendous efforts invested in the conception of syllabi, these tools hardly help implement communicative language teaching (CLT) in their classrooms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.047 | 0.089 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".