An advantage of a skills-based syllabus is that it can make test writing (and administration) a uniform and streamlined process.

Like others have said, however, the assessment may or may not an accurate picture of what a student actually knows or understands.

Think about it.  It is fairly easy to "test" a skill.  However, mastery (or non-mastery) of a skill does not necessarily reflect a student's ability to think, reason, or process.  Skills-based learning is very low on the higher order thinking continuum.

The great danger of skills-based syllabuses is indeed the assumption that all knowledge can be boiled down to specific procedures or demonstrations of knowledge that should be performed on demand and evaluated through defined measurements. As the use of high-stakes evaluations become more widely used - the people who control the allocation of funding for education love such tests because the data obtained from the tests makes it easy to draw lines between acceptable and nonacceptable test results - I fear for the future of "global and integrated communicative abilities" and other areas of learning that are essential but difficult to measure objectively.

 

A syllabus should ideally have a combination of both skills and topics.  For example, you may want students to read a certain genre.  You also might want them to be able to describe the characters.  The latter is the skill.  You need to be able to do both.  Teachers usually base the syllabus on some set of requirements, usually called standards in the US. You need to use skills, but you need to keep an eye on the bigger picture too. Most of what we teach cannot be dumbed down to one isolated, discrete skill.

See eNotes Ad-Free

Start your 48-hour free trial to get access to more than 30,000 additional guides and more than 350,000 Homework Help questions answered by our experts.

Get 48 Hours Free Access

Already a member? Log in here.