Making the instructional curriculum as an interactive, contextualized process: case studies of seven ESOL teachers

Abstract

This article reports on data from interpretive case studies of seven well-qualified, experienced teachers of adult ESOL, collected through weekly interviews and analysis of documents and materials produced over the duration of a whole course for each teacher. Teachers’ knowledge and experience was apparent in their ability to conceptualize and plan globally in the pre-course phase, to establish rapport and diagnose learners’ developmental priorities as soon as teaching began, and to weave a coherent instructional curriculum 1 from a variety of components and dimensions of conceptual content according to the developmental needs, wishes and responses of learners, syllabus pre-specifications, constraints of the teaching context and their own personal theories of best practice. The study draws attention to a number of differences between the curriculum making practices of experienced teachers and the content of language teacher education texts with regard to pre-course planning procedures and the separation of syllabus and methodology. Dissonances were also apparent between conventional descriptions of process—product orientations and strong—weak versions of communicative language teaching on the one hand, and the blended, non-standard approaches apparent in the courses in this study. The article identifies curriculum making principles and practices that were common to a number of teachers as a contribution to practice-based disciplinary knowledge and second language teacher education literature.

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