Investigating Junior and Senior High School English Teachers’ Perception toward the English Curriculum Guidelines

• Main Authors: Kuan-lin Chen, 陳冠霖
• Other Authors: Yu-ling You
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2010
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/94849384896818043702

碩士 === 國立彰化師範大學 === 兒童英語研究所 === 98 === The study aims to investigate the junior and senior high school English teachers’ perception toward the English curriculum guidelines by means of qualitative interview method. The goal of Grade 1-9 English curriculum and General Senior High School Temporary English Curriculum both stress on the connection with each other. In order to achieve curriculum articulation, teachers are considered to play an important role on the implementation of curriculum. Schubert (1986) states that “teachers are the curriculum” (p.157) since they are the key roles to instruct students and design activities according to their perception of curriculum guidelines. In other words, teacher’s perception plays an important role on the success of curriculum implementation and curriculum articulation. Due to that, the study intends to explore both teachers’ perception toward the English curriculum guidelines and then further to examine the curriculum implementation and articulation situation. Sixteen certified junior and senior high school English teachers participated in this study. In the data collection procedure, the interviews were the main resource of the research data. The interview questions were developed by the researcher based on the reviewed literature. All the interviews were recorded and then transcribed verbatim for future analysis and comparison. There were five major findings in the current study. First, the result of the interview protocols showed that most of the junior and senior high school teachers had little understanding toward the curriculum guidelines. Second, most of the junior and senior high school teachers perceived that, after the implementation of curriculum guidelines, listening abilities were more emphasized than before and the teaching materials were also much more diversified. Third, in the selection of the teaching materials, most of the junior and senior high school teachers would refer the standard in the curriculum guidelines as the reference for selection. Fourth, most of the junior and senior high school teachers believed that CLT had a good intention. However, their implementation of CLT was influenced under limited class hour, test orientation, the phenomenon of bimodal distribution, and low proficiency of speaking. Fifth, though multiple-assessment was considered to have positive effect, most of the junior and senior high school teachers would still adopt traditional paper and pencil test as the teaching assessment under limited class hour, test-orientation and the subjectivity of grades. Based on the findings of the study, it is suggested that the educational authorities should pay more attention to the curriculum disconnection in order to appropriately adjust and modify the gap to achieve curriculum articulation. In addition, it is hoped that the current study could bring an insight into the curriculum implementation situation of junior and senior high schools for English teachers and educational authorities.