This thesis aims to review the problems I have observed during my teaching practice and discuss how we could address the problems through curriculum design accordingly. It has been observed that students' pragmatic competence needs to be developed and improved. However, pragmatic instruction is not a main focus in the school curriculum. Given the fact that students have limited exposure to English in their daily life, pragmatic instruction is necessary and can be beneficial to sharpen their communication ability. The curriculum design highlights explicit pragmatic teaching, awareness-raising approach and the use of indirect strategies based on contexts. The speech act request is chosen since it is frequently used in daily life. Students are also given sufficient practice to strengthen their acquisition. Discourse completion task and role- play task are used. Another focus of this thesis is reading instruction. Students' performance of reading comprehension is not satisfying. Moreover, reading can be a valuable tool to obtain information and will be important to their future study. To improve their reading performance and motivation, the curriculum design focuses on explicit reading strategy instruction, teacher's modelling of using reading strategies and how to incorporate vocabulary teaching in reading instruction. Cooperative learning is also promoted in the curriculum design since students are able to pool individual knowledge and develop higher-order thinking through discussion. Besides, the curriculum is designed to enhance students' motivation for reading and help them engage in extensive reading.