English National Curriculum Research Articles

Policy and Practice of Listening in Secondary English Education: A Critical Reflection from Bangladesh

The current National Curriculum 2012 of English (VI- X) in Bangladesh incorporates both listening and speaking skills for its English education. Textbooks have also been designed in accordance with the policy which is set by the National Curriculum and Textbook Broad (NCTB). The English textbook, titled English for Today (EfT), was designed in alignment with the current National Curriculum for English (VI-X) for students in grades 6 through 10. The target of the EfT is to achieve students’ competency in integrated four skills of English language: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. However, although the listening module is now in policy and classroom practice, it is neither assessed in school or in public exams at the secondary level (Kabir, 2020). This study explores the perceptions of policy and practice of listening in secondary English education in Bangladesh. This study may be significant as little research has been done in Bangladesh on listening skill and its significance for language competence, let alone on the teaching of listening in connection to language learning. This qualitative study is based on in-depth interview data collected in 2019. The interviews included pertinent participants of policymakers and secondary English teachers. The findings indicated that there was a disconnect in curriculum, classroom practice and assessment in secondary English education.

Standards, Instruction and Assessment of EFL Writing in Schools: Lessons From China's Basic Education

ABSTRACTThis paper analyses the current situation of English as a foreign language (EFL) writing in basic education in mainland China with a focus on the English curriculum standards, instruction and assessment. The National English Curriculum Standards launched by China's Ministry of Education ratified a general framework for EFL writing instruction and assessment in schools while the municipal curriculum guides, such as the one of Shanghai, include more specific writing performance descriptors. Comparisons of EFL curricula with other countries and regions suggest diverse examples and updated resources be added to China's current curriculum standards to improve feasibility and modernity. Moreover, there are discrepancies between the Curriculum Standards and the implementation in the classroom. Sociocultural factors, such as teachers' beliefs, instructional materials and the exam culture, have led to the tension between new pedagogies advocated in the Curriculum Standards and conventional instructional practices. This study further explores the writing section in the large‐scale high‐stake exams, that is, Zhongkao and Gaokao, which have long exerted strong influence on teachers' instruction and assessment practices. Regularising professional training in writing instruction and improving teachers' assessment literacy are thus suggested. Local practitioners' attempts to integrate the process approach into traditional teaching methods and scholars' efforts to develop the writing scales for assessment are discussed to offer policy and pedagogical implications for other education contexts that are faced with similar challenges.

This Is Not a ‘Drill’: Young People’s Understandings of and Hopes for Sustainability Education in England

Global surveys show that young people are concerned about sustainability and climate change and how it will affect their future. Education for Sustainability is seen as a key approach that can equip young people with the knowledge, skills, and competencies to act for climate justice. Despite much policy attention on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), this paper argues that current educational approaches inadequately prepare young people to understand and engage with climate change and sustainability issues. Drawing on a unique survey of 1655 young people in England, this study identifies significant knowledge gaps in understandings of sustainability concepts and a strong demand for educational reforms. Quantitative data reveal variations in sustainability understandings across age, gender, and income, while qualitative insights uncover young people’s feelings about the gaps in their education, exposing their fears, anger, powerlessness, and hopes for change. This study highlights the dominance of consumer choice in young people’s perceptions of sustainability, emphasizing the need to shift from individualistic to collective actions. This paper concludes with a call to integrate sustainability education into the English National Curriculum to promote holistic and action-oriented learning and create opportunities for nurturing hope through transformative education.

초등영어 보기(viewing) 학습에 대한 학습자 인식 및 실태 연구

Objectives This study aims to investigate the learners' perceptions and practices of English viewing in elementary school, and find educational implications on teaching viewing. Methods For this, a survey was conducted from Nov. 13 to Nov. 16, 2023 to 531 elementary English learners. They were asked 17 questions about perceptions and practices of viewing, as well as their perceptions and practices with English digital textbooks(EDT) in learning viewing. Results The analysis results are as follows. First, most of the students were positive about their viewing ability and attitudes and reported that digital devices helped their viewing. The students used and preferred tablet PC the most, and they used EDT, AI digital learning materials, Youtube for English viewing. More than half of the students engaged in self-directed viewing within 30 minutes or an hour, but teacher-centered viewing lessons were conducted in most classes. Second, the experiences of students in using EDT were limited at home, also student-centered learning using EDT was not conducted in school. Third, Most of students were positive about viewing using EDT, and had high interests and motivation in viewing using EDT. Conclusions For the successful implementation of the 2022 revised national English curriculum, digital devices need to be supplied to every student for learning viewing, and digital device usage training courses will be helpful for their learning. Furthermore, teachers should make an effort to participate in training to teach viewing effectively. In addition, AI EDT should be developed to promote students' self-directed viewing and student-centered viewing lessons.

Listening to teachers talk about multimodality and multimodal texts: considerations for the national English curriculum

Multimodal texts are an integral part of children’s lives. Rapid advancements in media and mobile technologies have increasingly expanded children’s capability to view, share, design, and produce multimodal texts. However, Australia’s updated English curriculum falls short of offering teachers a metalanguage to help children understand the complex ways linguistic, visual, audio, gestural, and spatial modes work together to convey meaning. This article reports qualitative research on teachers talking about multimodal texts within their pedagogy and literacy practice. Data were generated through semi-structured interviews with eight early years and primary Australian teachers. Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is the analytic framework utilised in the research. From teachers’ talk, findings show that if children are to be effective multimodal text users, analysts, designers, and creators, the curriculum should not privilege particular modes and their associated metalanguage but provide teachers with a metalanguage for all modes of meaning-making.

Strategies for Implementing "Integrated Teaching-Learning-Assessment" in the Context of English Core Literacy

The emergence of the National English Curriculum Standards (2017 Edition, Revised in 2020) has sparked widespread attention and resonance in the field of secondary school English teaching. Delving into the study and application of the new curriculum standards has become a crucial entry point and lever for secondary school English teachers to renew their teaching philosophies, enhance teaching effectiveness, and advance the depth of education. The new curriculum standards provide important guidance on how secondary school English teachers should teach, how students should learn, and how to effectively integrate teaching, learning, and assessment, thereby delineating the direction of English teaching in the current era of emphasizing subject core literacy in quality education. The 2022 Compulsory Education Curriculum Standards explicitly mention the curriculum design concept of "integrating teaching and assessment," further deepening the intrinsic connections among teaching, learning, and assessment. Therefore, based on the guiding principles of "integrating teaching and assessment," this paper relies on the 2017 edition of the new curriculum standards and combines the practical situation of secondary school English teaching to analyze how to comprehensively understand the connotation of "integrating teaching and assessment" and how to implement effective teaching and assessment practices.

Unravelling the deficit ideologies in English language education in Pakistan: A decolonial perspective

AbstractIn this study the author combines translingualism and raciolinguistic perspectives to analyze the language ideologies and idealized listening/reading subject positions that undergird discourses on English language teaching in Pakistan. Drawing on data from national policy documents, the national curriculum for English, and English proficiency assessment reports, he shows how discourses on English as a medium of instruction, the English language curriculum, and assessment in Pakistan are fraught with deficit ideologies that emphasize a particular view of English proficiency that serves as an imaginary line of demarcation between proficient and deficient English teachers and reinforce linguistic and socioeconomic hierarchies. Instead of reified, Anglo‐normative orientations to English proficiency, the author proposes a translingual orientation that places students' multilingual identities at the center of English language teaching (ELT) practices. He concludes with a call for ELT practitioners and critical language scholars to develop organic links between classroom translingualism and political activism in order to dismantle socioeconomic hierarchies.

A Survey on Cultural Awareness Cultivation in Senior High School

The National English Curriculum Standard for Senior High School (2017 edition 2020 revised) points out the cultural awareness, as one of the key competence, can help students form international vision and cross-cultural communication ability, and foster a sense of human community with a shared future. But in the actual teaching process, English teachers often ignore the cultivation of student's cultural awareness and the level of students’ cultural awareness is not qualified. This essay aims to find out the current situation of high school students’ cultural awareness. The research question is what is the current situation of students’ cultural awareness in senior high school. In order to answer this question, the researcher did a survey in a senior high school in Chengdu, Sichuan Province in China. Based on the discussion of the survey result, the researcher gives some suggestions to English teachers.

The effectiveness of a school-based phonics instructional material

The updated version of the national English curriculum for compulsory education was released in 2022. In this updated version, phonics was also required. Although studies about phonics were uprising again after the release of the new curriculum, most of the previous studies did not specify phonics instruction approach or obtain a larger sample size. Besides, previous studies called for a school-based phonics instructional material to enhance English as a foreign language (EFL) beginners’ word recognition ability at word level. To bridge the gap, the researchers compiled a phonics instructional material based on synthetic phonics approach in light of the new national English curriculum and bottom-up reading model. To evaluate the effectiveness of such a phonics material, a number of 366 EFL students from three strata across two schools participated in this quasi-experiment via stratified random sampling technique. They experienced a pre-test, 16 weeks of training via the phonics material, a post-test as well as a delayed retention test, which was held three months later. The results of both independent t-test and paired samples t-test have indicated that the newly compiled phonics material can improve EFL students’ word recognition ability up to 50% and that the knowledge was well-retained after a period of time as practices went on. The results have further implied that to better implement phonics instruction and to radically improve EFL students’ reading ability, the solution might be to assign time in the extra-curriculum service to teach phonics via explicit and systematic synthetic phonics instruction tailored according to the school-based phonics material.

Bloom의 신교육목표분류체계 기반 2015 및 2022 개정 초등영어 교육과정 성취기준 비교·분석

Objectives The purpose of this study is to compare the achievement standards of the 2022 revised national English curriculum with those of the 2015 curriculum based on Bloom's revised taxonomy.
 Methods The 2022 revised curriculum made efforts to ensure that the purpose of competency education is ac-tually implemented in the achievement standards, from the perspectives of knowledge, skills, and attitudes. To examine whether this purpose has been achieved, this study compares and analyzes the achievement standards of the revised English curriculum in 2015 and 2022 in terms of knowledge dimension and cognitive process di-mension based on Bloom's revised taxonomy of educational objectives.
 Results In terms of knowledge dimension, the achievement standards of both the 2015 and 2022 revised curricu-lum were the most distributed in “factual knowledge”. There were almost no achievement standards correspond-ing to “conceptual knowledge” and “procedural knowledge” in both the 2015 and 2022 revised curriculum. Meta-cognitive knowledge has increased in proportion in the 2022 revised curriculum. This is analyzed as a result of reflecting strategic knowledge and affective attitudes in the achievement standards. In terms of cognitive process dimension, both the 2015 and 2022 revised curriculum achievement standards showed a tendency to be focused on low-level cognitive functions of “remember” and “understand”, but unlike 2015, the 2022 curriculum showed a change of introducing high-level cognitive functions such as “evaluate” and “create”.
 Conclusions These changes show that the 2022 revised national English curriculum strives to present the ach-ievement standards in a balanced manner in terms of knowledge, skills, and attitudes in order to reflect the pur-pose of competency education.

초등영어 교육과정 및 수업에서 문화 간 화자를 위한 문화다양성교육의 방향

The purpose of this study is to suggest the basic deliberation on policy and implementation of cultural diversity education for intercultural speakers in English classes. To achieve the purpose, the 2022 revised English National Curriculum was analysed in terms of cultural diversity education. The findings are as follows: (1) Intercultural communicative competence for intercultural speakers wasn't specified in the characters and the goals of the curriculum. (2) The value, norm, belief, and cultural custom of cultural diversity were not presented in the teaching materials. (3) Accomplishment standards were not established transparently in the aspect of cultural diversity. (4) Teaching-learning methods and classroom activities were not specified for learners to get high motivation and involvement in classes. (5) Scope and sequence were not considered based on grade clusters in terms of education for cultural diversity. From the findings, it was suggested that direction on policy and implementation of cultural diversity education needs to be established based on content and structural design for intercultural speakers to systematically and effectively improve their competence on cultural diversity in primary English classes.

The Changes in Text Cohesion of Senior High School Students Measured by Coh‐Metrix as a Function of Grade Level

National English Curriculum Standards for General High School sets requirements for text cohesion and text cohesion is an essential component of English writing and English writing evaluation. However, previous studies explored text cohesion mainly from perspectives of college students, horizontal comparison and traditional tools. In this study, a corpus of 300 essays by grade level (senior one and senior three) are analyzed computationally by Coh‐Metrix to examine whether text cohesion improves as grade level rises. During the specific process, this paper aims to identify characteristics and discriminate differences between the text cohesion created by the two grades. The main instrument is Coh‐Metrix—a type of computational tool that offers over 200 measurements to quantify texts. This study mainly employs the measures under the category of referential cohesion, LSA and connectives of it to assess text cohesion. The results demonstrate that as the grade level increases, text cohesion gets better. Specifically, these students produce more noun overlap of adjacent sentences, argument overlap of adjacent sentences, noun overlap of all sentences, argument overlap of all sentences, stem overlap of all sentences, LSA overlap of adjacent sentences, LSA overlap of adjacent paragraphs, LSA overlap of given/new sentences all connectives and additive connectives.

Efficacy of Inquiry-Based Learning and Teaching Approach in EFL Inferential Reading Comprehension among Chinese High School Students

Chinese EFL high school teaching often overlooks critical inferential reasoning in reading comprehension. This study proposes a shift from teacher-centric methods to an Inquiry-Based Learning and Teaching (IBLT) framework, expected to enhance EFL inferential reading abilities among Chinese high school students. This aligns with China's National English Curriculum Standards, emphasizing the importance of such proficiency. The study gauges current EFL reading comprehension in Chinese high schools and assesses IBLT's efficacy through a controlled, nine-week experiment, with data analysis revealing a positive impact. The findings aim to inform pedagogical tactics, promoting a more interactive, student-focused teaching model.

Exploring Mutual Learning of Four Chinese Senior High School EFL Teachers in a Collaborative Action Research Community

Abstract English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers’ professional development has been attached much importance with the advent of the National English Curriculum Standards (NECS in short) for Senior High Schools as it initiates the shift from knowledge-skill-oriented education to competence-oriented education. As an effective way for teachers’ professional development, collaborative action research community is introduced in this study to provide teachers with opportunities for mutual engagement, meaning negotiation, and a shared repertoire. Four senior high school EFL teachers from four different schools were studied in a collaborative action research community to explore how teachers from diversified backgrounds achieve mutual learning for their professional development. With data collected from observation, interviews, and journals, the study reveals that diversity and partiality help maintain mutual engagement in the community of practice. Meaning negotiation and mutual accountability in a joint enterprise contribute to the coherence of the community. Moreover, the participative activity of online and offline group discussion and the common topic of thinking visualization were treated as sources of a shared repertoire, an essential indication of a harmonious community. In this case, this study extrapolates how the collaborative action research community achieves harmony to support teachers’ professional development in action research.

Revisiting the relationships of n-gram measures to L2 writing proficiency: Comparisons between genres and connections to vocabulary levels

The effect of multiword sequences on L2 writing proficiency among different genres and their relations to vocabulary levels are understudied. In this study 60 indices of bigrams and trigrams related to frequency, association, range and proportion of frequent n-grams were employed to analyze 600 rated English essays and 600 rated English request letters composed by Chinese high school students. We investigated whether there were similar or varied n-gram measures predictive of their holistic scores among the two genres and the relationship between specific multiword combinations connected to the n-gram measures predictive of writing scores and their vocabulary levels in the Chinese national English curriculum. The results showed that three pairs of similar n-gram measures predicted the holistic scores among these two types of writings, but five indices were uniquely associated with letter scores. Additionally, in both genres, higher mean MI associations in more proficient compositions were significantly correlated to more multiword combinations containing words from college and graduate levels in advanced writings than in intermediate writings. This study contributed to a better understanding of the relations among word associations, vocabulary levels and writing proficiency among high school student English writings.

Formative Assessment in English Learning and Teaching: An Instrumental Tool for Students and Teachers

The National English Curriculum Standards for General High Schools (2017 Edition, 2020 Revised) emphasizes that teaching assessment should be carried out throughout the teaching process and be reflected in all aspects of teaching practice, including the process of collecting information through multiple channels, as well as various types of assessment on teaching practice. Assessment plays a crucial role as the last part of the teaching and learning process. Starting from the characteristics and role of formative assessment, this paper excavates the shortcomings of formative assessment in practice and put forward some feasible suggestions.

Analysis and Evaluation of PEP Senior High School Textbooks New Senior English from the Perspective of Key Competencies

The status of textbooks is significant in English learning.Textbooks not only provide students with learning resources, but also help teachers design teaching activities. A variety of textbooks are published in the market. For this reason, textbooks evaluation becomes more crucial. This paper is about the analysis and evaluation of senior high school textbooks New Senior English published by People’s Education Press from the Perspective of key competencies. The evaluation of New Senior English is conducted according to the requirements of National English Curriculum Standards. After analyzing the New Senior English, it finds that the textbook has both advantages and disadvantages, so teachers should make adjustments based on the actual classroom situation, instead of repeating what the textbook says.

Negotiating Polycentric Power Dynamics in China through Digital Multimodal Composing

AbstractDigital multimodal composing (DMC) has been receiving increasing attention in the research on English as an additional language (EAL) instruction in higher education. While this approach responds to students' changing writing practices in the digital world, it can create tension with mandated curricula and high‐stakes testing regimes that prioritize print‐based essay writing as in China. However, little research has explored the possibility of negotiating the tension and bridging DMC and print‐based writing through instructional design. This article reports an instrumental case study that investigates a university instructor's pedagogical approach of using DMC in an academic literacy classroom in China. Through qualitative inductive analysis and multimodal analysis, this study identifies five centers of polycentric power relations and explores how and why the instructor designed, implemented, and evaluated the DMC project to leverage students' digital literacy interests, meet the goals of the national English curriculum, and prepare students for the standardized tests. We argue that she served as a digital literacy broker who not only harnessed students' passion for digital communication but also fulfilled the requirements of different centers.

Exploring the re-legitimisation of messages for health and physical education within contemporary English and Welsh curricula reform

ABSTRACT This paper explores how messages for health and PE ([H]PE) within English and Welsh curricula are being re-legitimised through distinct performance and competence pedagogic models. Drawing upon Bernstein’s sociology of knowledge (Bernstein, 1996. Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: Theory, research, critique. Taylor and Francis; 2000. Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: Theory, research and critique (revised ed.). Rowman and Littlefield) data was generated through a deductive content analysis of the contemporary statutory English National Curriculum for Physical Education (NCPE) and the new Curriculum for Wales (CfW), Health and Well-Being Area of Learning and Experience (HWB-AoLE). Findings illustrate how the current English and Welsh curricula are re-legitimising discourses for (H)PE through a more prominent emphasis placed on competency models whereby the educator and learner are given greater autonomy to control the transmission and acquisition of (H)PE messages. However, the curriculum documents are beset with contradictions that to an extent reproduce discourses of performativity and individualisation. Consequently, the paper emphasises the need for educators and policymakers to be given the opportunity for critical dialogue on the implications of re-legitimising messages through competency models for all educator and learner identities.

Analysis of English as a Lingua Franca features and its feasibility in the 2022 national English curriculum

Analysis of English as a Lingua Franca features and its feasibility in the 2022 national English curriculum