Exploring teachers’ curriculum decision-making : text selection in the Hong Kong senior secondary English language classroom

Abstract

This case study aims to explore teachers’ curriculum decision-making by examining text selection in the Hong Kong senior secondary English Language classroom. It attempts to investigate what criteria teachers use when selecting authentic texts and designing the associated task for their senior secondary classes and the factors influencing how they establish their criteria for the text selection. Three participants teaching English in a local secondary school were selected for the case study by means of convenience sampling. Individual interviews with the participants, content analysis of government and school documents as well as learning materials, and the researcher’s observations were adopted to collect the data for triangulation, followed by a qualitative and interpretative approach to data analysis. It has been suggested that there are seven main criteria teachers adopt for text selection, including the length of text, the variety of themes, text types, and task types, the coverage of multiple perspectives, the inclusion of positive messages, the text authenticity, the availability of multimodality, as well as whether the content is up-to-date. Factors influencing teachers’ decisions at the conscious level can be categorised into nine aspects at three different levels, namely students, teachers, and the context, while there is also a possibility of having subconscious-level factors, such as training and development, experience, and reference to documents, which might impact on teachers’ choices. Implications of how the results of the present study could contribute to the existing theoretical fields, and inform the design of teacher training programmes and future investigations are then recommended.