Title: Syllabus design
Headings: 
A. Synthetic vs. Analytic syllabus types
B. Conceptual syllabus vs. conventional curriculum
C. Pedagogical values
D. Competence, proficiency, and performance
Assignment 1:

Content: Finally, there's no room for professional exchange, PD, and objective assessment of students' progress nor effectiveness of such course. Conversely, the proposed conceptual syllabus is an attempt to operationalize HOW the L2 is to be learned and taught. It's major unit of analysis is the task format or an activity type. There can be activities stimulating bottom-up processing or top-down task completion. There's room for imitation exercises, concept formation tasks, summary writing, speech act analysis and so on. Operationalized in this way, the conceptual syllabus becomes the inner layer between students and the curriculum. Curriculum doesn't have to include meaningless, unrealistic, irrelevant, and unobservable teaching goals for the course. It can be operationalized in sheer numbers representing the score of a standardized proficiency test. More specifically, the interval scale of a standardized proficiency test can be used to project expected progress of students who sit the test twice: in the beginning of the semester and in the end.