Taking a look at several kinds of syllabus design, I found that each design
explained in this material fundamentally differs from others in terms of what to
be considered as its criterion. As for the components of syllabus designing process, Robinson explained at the very beginning that it consists of setting units which are eventually organized in sequence to construct the entire syllabus (or in the opposite order or without setting any prospective plan). Each syllabus design has its unique criterion, and thus its own units and learning process based on it. I personally learned a lot from each syllabus design since I have never thought of what syllabuses are actually based on. As my experience as an ESL learner, all I noticed about the syllabus was that teachers taught us based on what were on the textbook, in the order grammatical items are presented in it. As an ESL teacher, I just made teaching plan basically along the textbook as I told by my instructor. Actually, I felt it really important to actually think about and plan what to teach and in what order, depending on the group of students we teach. The effective teaching should always be learner-centered and creative. In terms of the role of learners in syllabus design, the biggest interest of mine in the reading was how to set units and organize them. Some of the designs are made, grammatically or structurally grading items to be learned based on the analysis of difficulty, collocation, function, frequency and so on, or on the categories of items. We might say that there are some sort of such universal learning process for ESL learners and that we can categorize and grade language components for them to learn, but it actually depends on individual learners, each of whom has different linguistic, cultural, and social backgrounds. One of the examples for this might be how some European students and Asian students perceive a certain grammar in different ways. If the mother tongue of the European students are from the same language family as English, their language and English may share many grammatical concepts that is completely alien to the Asian students whose first language is from the different language family. In such a case, the certain grammatical item might be different in how it is perceived from each group of students. For one group, it might be easy and thus should be learned at the very beginning, but for the other, it may not. Thus, every teacher should know that what they know about syllabus design might not work for their students. However hard we learn theories of syllabus design, they are not more than just fundamental knowledge based on which we actually create syllabus for our students. Teaching activities are thus always need to be learner-centered and creative. Looking at different kinds of syllabus design gave me many insights to know what we can consider in planning our teaching. Also, I found that there were no perfect design since it should be actually adjusted whom we teach. The important role of teachers might be getting to know various syllabus design and understand their underlying theory and make use of them designing their own syllabus. Also, to do this, they need to observe students well in order to know their background, needs and internal language competency to think how the language would be taught internalized.