Laura Hull's teaching experience in academic English, intensive English, and English for special purposes programs spans both ESL and EFL settings. She has been an administrator, curriculum designer, and staff developer for language programs and community service programs such as Hospice. She has been involved in designing and teaching courses for business personnel in the United States for more than six years. The experience she describes here occurred over a period of a year and involved developing a curriculum framework for an existing program of loosely related courses for corporate executives from Asia, Latin America, and Europe.

The course development focus for this chapter is evaluation. Consider the following questions as you read:

Whose needs and expectations did Hull take into account in evaluating the existing program?

How does the framework assist in reconciling the various needs?

Curriculum development process

The call came late in the day on a Thursday. Could I coteach a corporate tutorial starting on Monday? There was an emergency — the instructor who was to do the whole tutorial had a scheduling conflict — and a split tutorial for this corporate student was the best solution. I would teach in the afternoons. The student was a middle manager in a pharmaceutical company who needed to work on some basic language and presentation skills before a series of important meetings at his U.S. corporate headquarters, where he would be presenting proposals to senior management.