Abstract
<p>In any educational institutions, designing curricula would be one of the most important processes for educating students with coherence and efficiency. They are also tools for institutions to make their teaching philosophy visible to their students and teachers. This research analyses how a foreign language class was constructed from two different perspectives: 1) how the curriculum shaped the class under study (macro-level analysis); and 2) how the environment formed the class (micro-level analysis). This study can be considered as a sequel to my previous study that looked at differences in on-task behaviour in two compulsory English classes for Japanese undergraduate students, taught in different environments: a regular classroom and a computer room. The result showed that the environmental differences altered their learning behaviour. Leading on from the previous study, this study investigated why there were differences in learning behaviour and how these differences emerged by looking at the teachers and their students’ interpretations of the curriculum. The study used a new analytical tool in the field of language education, Actor-Network Theory, for analysing the influence that the human and nonhuman (i.e., computers, syllabus) actors had in between. These actors were mapped to visualise the actions caused by the influence to capture how the course was designed and executed. The maps revealed that the curriculum was altered by the teacher and the students, mainly due to the environment they were in. The paper concludes with some suggestions to improve the relationship between the curriculum and its stakeholders.</p>
Highlights
Designing a curriculum may be one of the earliest steps that educators need to go through for implementing a course at any educational institutions
The current study looks at how the curriculum for a compulsory foreign language course for Japanese undergraduate students influenced in shaping two classes taught in two different environments: a traditional classroom and a computer room
How and when do the alterations to the course occur? Does this mean that the curriculum designer’s intentions of learning process and outcomes are changed when the curriculum is executed by teachers and their learners? In order to investigate these issues, the current study looks at how a foreign language curriculum was designed by a curriculum designer and how the actual learning and teaching were carried out in two different learning environments: a computer room and a traditional classroom
Summary
Designing a curriculum may be one of the earliest steps that educators need to go through for implementing a course at any educational institutions. The design process of this research may be initiated by conducting a needs analysis by determining desired outcomes, and organising the content followed by choosing learning experience that serves to achieve the desired outcome These classifications of designing curricula may seem to point to different teaching theories and tasks, they share one common goal: improvement of the target language (TL) skills. The in-class student activities were recorded on videos, which were analysed by using ActorNetwork Theory (ANT) by tracing student interactions between humans and nonhumans (e.g., computers, smartphones, textbooks, etc.), in order to identify major nonhuman actors in both environments, and how they influenced student activities in two different classroom settings The students in this course were required to give a group presentation using PowerPoint slides based on a small-scale research on the topic of their choice. The findings of the previous research, showed that different learning environments might create very different learning paths between the students in these different classroom settings, despite the fact that the quality of their end products was more or less the same
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