An Investigation Of Alignment Between Senior High School English Teaching And The New Curriculum Standard From The Perspective Of Core Competencies

The English Curriculum Standard for Senior High School(Education Department 2018)(short for the NECS)was published in 2018.It is an official documentary curriculum,while teachers’ teaching practice follows an operational curriculum.The study from the NECS to teaching practice is a gradual transformation from curriculum stipulation to curriculum implementation,from the ideal one to the practical one.In this process,teachers’ teaching,the key to implementation,determines the quality of students’ learning directly.Therefore,the alignment between the NECS and teaching can be taken as the coherence between the curriculum theory and practice in order to learn the gap between ideal and reality,so as to facilitate learning by means of shortening the gap.Teaching objectives,as the core of in instructional design,reflect teachers’ curriculum view,while learning activities are the reflection and manifestation of implementing the teaching objectives.Thus,analyzing teaching objectives and learning activities in regular class is the medium of investigating the effects of the curriculum implementation and contributes to teaching quality improvement.The present study took one class and four English teachers in Senior Grade One in a middle school in Tianjin as the research subjects to answer the following research questions:1)What is the alignment status between the English teaching objectives and the requirement in the NECS?2)What is the alignment status between the learning activities and the requirement in the NECS?3)What factors affect the degree of alignment between English teaching and the NECS?Classroom observation and the interview were employed as the research methods of the present study.Two units of classroom teaching were observed with the aid of the observation scale for data analysis.In addition to it,four English teachers were interviewed to find out the factors that influence the alignment.The main research findings of the study are as follows.First of all,the alignment between teaching objectives in classroom and the stipulation in the NECS is relatively high.Secondly,the alignment between learning activities and the expectation in the NECS is depressingly low.Thirdly,the factors affecting the alignment mainly lie in four aspects,including the concern of scores,the limited teaching hours,students’ English level,as well as the English teachers’ time allocation and professional levels.Based on the results,suggestions were put forward to change the situation.Firstly,take multiple strategies to promote teachers’ professionalism.Secondly,pay more attention to teachers’ psychological health.Thirdly,the harmful washback of the college entrance examination should be reduced and core competencies of English have to be emphasized and implemented in English class.