Critical Look at Situation Analysis of Jack. C. Richards: A Post-modernist View

Jack C. Richards in his book entitled the curriculum development in language teaching (2001), touches upon the situational analysis in the curriculum design and development. Macalister, & Nation (2010) further discuss environmental analysis, but it seems that their analysis is whether too general or vague. What this paper is looking for is a criticism of Richards’ general view on situation analysis and his overlooking of the critical aspect of post-modern pedagogy. Moreover, this paper is going to insert the post-modernists’ views on situational analysis and make an improvement over Richards’ (2001) proposal on situational analysis. The post-modernist situational analysis will focus beyond method approaches (Kumaravadivelu, 2003) as well as the provision of mobile assisted language learning (MALL), or computer assisted language learning (CALL) and distance learning in education, without which the new millennium in TEFL makes less sense.